Insurgent, Participatory Citizens: (Re)Making Politics in Northeastern Brazil

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Yutzy, Christopher B.

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Download date 29/09/2021 05:15:09

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/624488

INSURGENT, PARTICIPATORY CITIZENS: (Re)MAKING POLITICS IN NORTHEASTERN BRAZIL

Christopher B. Yutzy

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2017

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Christopher B. Yutzy, titled Insurgent, Participatory Citizens: (Re)Making Politics in Northeastern Brazil and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

th ______Date: April 14 , 2017 Dr. Marcela Vásquez-León

th ______Date: April 14 , 2017 Dr. Timothy J. Finan

th ______Date: April 14 , 2017 Dr. Brian Silverstein

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: April 14th, 2017 Dissertation Director: Marcela Vásquez-León

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: Christopher B. Yutzy

Acknowledgments

This page by no means completely reflects or adequately recognizes the many individuals who contributed to this achievement. However, as is custom, I will attempt to approximate an accurate accounting.

To my Grandfather Earl who exposed me to National Public Radio as a kid on the farm. The hours spent in tractors listening to political discussions and debate inspired me to become an expert many years later.

A sincere thanks to many friends, colleagues, and mentors: Tony, Brendan, Ben, Laurel, Joel, Mimi, Daniela, Jesus, Eniko, Amanda, Lumi, Jonna, Landon, Tom-Zé, Joan, Brackette, Sylvia, Diane, Mamadou, Jim, Carol, Átila, Juliana, Carlos, Lucas, Leide, Hudson, Nice, Raimundão, Jean, Moira, Doug, Sara, Francesca, Carlos, Gustavo, Patch, Emanuela, Jaime, and many more.

Especially to Nicolas, mano, I miss our discussions, and I hope you know how brilliant you are.

To my dissertation committee for their good humor and dedication in supervising my work. Marcela, a sincere thank you for introducing me to anthropology and helping me believe that I can achieve a doctoral degree. Tim, I will never forget our many discussions about research often fueled by an original bem gelada. You have taught me a lot, and your capacity to care for students as if they were family is inspiring. Brian, thanks for introducing me to much of the social theory used in this dissertation and your mentorship over the years.

To my crazy wonderful family, mom, dad, Erica, Chase, Jenna, Scott, and Mattias, it was always a circus, but anthropology often requires understanding and documenting the world in its most complex and strange moments. You are all an inspiration, I would not have it any other way.

To my extended family, much of my worldview was influenced by the many inspiring and courageous things you have all done and continue to do.

Adrienne, thanks for the consistent caffeine supply and the many staycations that helped me rejuvenate and stay focused. Lia and Rolfe, your ability to always put family first and, of course, bourbon second, was a great source of support over the years.

Support for this dissertation came in many forms, but I financially thank the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, the School of Anthropology, and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry. I also thank the City of Fortaleza for providing institutional support during my research.

To the non-humans, my plants, thanks for always being there. Even though a few of you have died and moved on, your presence and beckoning for water allowed us to grow together.

Finally, Heather, your patience, love, and commitment surpassed my grandest expectations and carried me through the lowest points as a graduate student. Now that this is over, I look forward to our future adventures and years of making jokes that only we would laugh at.

To Heather, we did it, just like we knew we would and always will.

Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables ...... 8 Abstract ...... 9 Introduction ...... 11 Research Objectives ...... 11 Historical Context: Re-democratizing Brazil ...... 16 From Authoritarianism to Participatory Democracy ...... 16 The Authoritarian Origins of Participatory Social Policy ...... 22 Theoretical Context: Tools of Modernity in Brazil ...... 29 Participatory Governance and Participation ...... 29 Transparency and Participatory Citizens ...... 31 Political Clientelism: An Evolving Tradition ...... 32 Field Site: Situating Grande Bom Jardim ...... 33 The Origins of Grande Bom Jardim ...... 36 On GBJ’s Political Traditions ...... 43 Methodology ...... 44 Ethnographic Fieldwork ...... 45 Archival/Secondary Sources ...... 50 Analysis and Products ...... 50 Concluding Remarks ...... 53 Bibliography ...... 57 APPENDIX A - When the Urban Poor Stop Protesting: From a politics of the street to institutions of transparency in Northeastern Brazil...... 62 Introduction ...... 62 The Politics of Transparency ...... 66 A Brief History of Fortaleza’s Favelas and Participation ...... 71 PROAFA - Programa de Assistência às Favelas da Área Metropolitana de Fortaleza ...... 76 Institutionalizing Participation ...... 76 PROAFA’s Participatory Legacy ...... 78 Transparency and Participation Today ...... 82 Haunted by an Authoritarian Past ...... 85 Conclusions: Reconnecting with the Street ...... 90 APPENDIX B - The Paradox of Participation: Political networks, participatory governance, and clientelism in Northeastern Brazil ...... 96 Introduction ...... 96 Participatory Governance in Brazil ...... 99 Clientelism and Rapid Urbanization: The Creation of Fortaleza’s Informal Political Networks ...... 105 GBJ’s Political Network & Participatory Programs ...... 110 The Vereador ...... 112 The Assessor –Refém da Politica Partidária ...... 114 The Community Leader ...... 118 The Social Militants - Quero o Povo no Poder! ...... 124 The Voters ...... 126 Conclusion ...... 128

APPENDIX C - Countering Clientelism in Northeastern Brazil: Núcleos de aproximação and feiras de serviços as viable alternatives...... 135 Introduction ...... 135 Participatory Governance and ‘the Political’ ...... 139 A Brief Overview of Participatory Approaches in Brazil ...... 141 The Setting ...... 145 Contesting Clientelism in the “Good Garden” ...... 148 Núcleos de Aproximação - NUAPS ...... 148 Feiras de Serviços - “Acabam Lesando o Bairro” ...... 155 Improving the Social Order ...... 160 Conclusion ...... 161

List of Figures

Figure 1: Map Showing the Location of Fortaleza, Brazil. 33 Figure 2: Map of the Average Monthly Income by Neighborhood in Fortaleza, Brazil 35 Figure 3: Map of Grande Bom Jardim and its Neighborhoods. 37 Figure 4: Map of Fortaleza's Regional Executive Secretariats. 40 Figure 5: Community Map of Key Political Actors in Grande Bom Jardim 48 Figure 6: Map of Grand Bom Jardim and its Neighborhoods. 73 Figure 7: Map of Grande Bom Jardim and its Neighborhoods. 104 Figure 8: Planning Phases of Fortaleza 2040. 144

List of Tables Table 1: Political Parties After Partisan Reform in Brazil, 1979. 20 Table 2: Grande Bom Jardim Population by Neighborhood. 41 Table 3: Variation in Population of Fortaleza 1920 to 2010. 71 Table 4: Influential Neighborhood Movements in Fortaleza, Brazil During the 1970s & 80s. 75

Abstract

This dissertation combines ethnography and history to study the co-evolution of participatory governance and clientelism in a context of urban poverty and re-democratization in the city of Fortaleza, capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, Brazil. Government sponsored participatory governance mechanisms have been employed in Brazil since the 1980s to re- incorporate civil society into such processes of government as budgeting and city planning. With an emphasis on citizen participation, participatory governance represents a new form of mediation between the state and society, one that provides an alternative to traditional forms of state-society relationships such as clientelism, a mainstay of Brazilian politics. Despite a large body of research on Brazil’s participatory programs, little attention has been paid to the use of participatory social policy by the military regime (1964-1985) and the impacts of participation’s authoritarian origins on contemporary state-society relations. Three inter-related questions guide the analysis. First, how has participatory governance, originally employed in Fortaleza by the military government, shaped how the urban poor organize and exercise their political citizenship today? Second, how has clientelism adapted to participatory institutions? Do participatory mechanisms aid the urban poor in overcoming existing societal and political power structures?

Finally, how have grassroots (non-state sponsored) participatory organizations shaped local conceptions of politics and civic engagement? The main contribution of this dissertation is to bring anthropological discussions on participatory governance in Brazil to bear on discussions surrounding political clientelism and political participation, in a context of democratization in poor urban communities.

The analysis, developed in three appended articles, is based on data from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Fortaleza involving participant observation, in-depth interviews, and a review of archival data from city participatory planning offices and local universities. The data provides evidence that the institutionalization of civil society’s engagement with the state led to new expressions of and limitations to citizenship among Fortaleza’s urban poor. I argue that the authoritarian origins of participatory social policy in Fortaleza led to the fragmentation of strong civic mobilization in the 1980s and consolidated new forms of urban clientelism.

Contemporary participatory governance programs have diversified urban political networks, which lessons the power of traditional clientelist patrons, but some patrons have adapted by institutionalizing methods of exchange within participatory programs and local organizations.

Recent informal participatory mechanisms have emerged to assert localized or alternate governmentalities. These grassroots forms respond to the paradoxical and contested nature of participation in participatory programs in Fortaleza’s peripheries; that they often fail to achieve long-term solutions to local issues through sustained civic mobilization.

Introduction

Research Objectives

Since the early 1980s Brazil has employed state sponsored participatory governance mechanisms to re-incorporate civil society into such processes of government as budgeting and city planning. Participatory governance is an important part of its transition to democracy after twenty years of military rule (1964-1985). These programs are most common in Brazil’s urban areas where 85% of the country’s 200 million inhabitants reside (IBGE, 2010). While participatory programs have been backed by a range of political parties, the Partido dos

Trabalhadores (Workers’ party – PT) municipal administrations are most notable for their efforts to challenge traditional elites’ control over local government by incorporating citizens into both the execution of government programs and into decision-making processes that determine public policy and program implementations (Abers, 1996). Such modes of citizen engagement generally take the form of municipal councils, or community forums in which participants take on roles as

“citizen agents,” and “agents of change,” promoting citizenship and progress. Issues such as municipal budgets, healthcare access, housing, education, and security, are among the most debated issues in these settings. Through an emphasis on citizen participation, participatory governance mechanisms represent a new form of mediation between the state and society

(Montambeault, 2016). In fact, one that allows for increased state-society cooperation, purported by some to even challenge Latin America’s elitist forms of democracy (Avritzer, 2002). Aside from a few exceptions (i.e., Montambeault, 2016), little research has focused on the nature of the transformation in state-society relationships related to participatory governance. Participatory mechanisms are one way, among many, to link politicians and citizens.

Traditionally in much of Brazil, clientelism has served as the primary linkage between its citizens and the state and between various levels of government (Hagopian, 1990). Clientelism or patronage (terms I use interchangeably) relies on personalized and privileged access to public goods and resources. Its exchanges are often non-transparent and dyadic in nature and its relationships asymmetrical. Participatory mechanisms have been shown by some scholars to challenge or lessen local level reliance on clientelism (Abers, 1998), leading to more equitable access to public resources (Avritzer, 2009). However, others have shown clientelism and participatory initiatives to coexist (Wampler, 2007). Thus, questioning the nature of exactly how participatory mechanisms transform state-society relationships becomes increasingly important.

If clientelism is not static and can also transform and adapt in the face of democratizing procedures, what does this mean for state institutions and citizen engagement (Montambeault,

2016)? This question serves as a point of departure for this dissertation which, in a broad sense, questions the (co)evolving nature of clientelism and participatory mechanisms in urban Brazil beginning with an analysis of participatory initiatives used by the military government in the late

1970s and early 1980s. Taking an historical and ethnographic approach to local level democratization, this dissertation intends to account for both formal state sponsored and informal grassroots approaches to forming state-society relationships.

With a focus on five impoverished neighborhoods known as Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ) in Fortaleza, Brazil, the capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, this dissertation contributes a better understanding of the way such modern practices as participatory governance, espousing a liberal view of politics as transparent and open, shape the urban poor’s views of, and participation in the political sphere and impact traditional forms of state-society interaction, such as clientelism. Participatory approaches to governance in Brazil are explored from the

perspective of local communities as the political pendulum has swung from a context of authoritarianism to democratic rule in Fortaleza. Three interrelated questions guide the analysis.

First, I intend to fill in a gap in the literature by asking how participatory governance, first employed in Fortaleza in 1979 as a national housing program backed by the military government, has shaped how the urban poor organize and act politically, or exercise their political citizenship today. Taking an historical view, this question compares participatory initiatives under authoritarian and democratic rule in Fortaleza to better understand how formal state sponsored participatory governance initiatives have influenced local processes of political and social exclusion. In this way, I go beyond the presupposed view that participation is transformative in a democratic sense and rather question the political motives that precede the government’s use of participatory social policy. Second, I question how clientelism has adapted

(or not) to participatory institutions and whether participatory mechanisms aid the urban poor in overcoming existing societal and political power structures (see: Gaventa & Cornwall, 2006;

Mohan & Stokke, 2000). Finally, I ask how grassroots participatory organizations shape local conceptions of politics and civic engagement. This relates to the second question by querying how informal modes of participation, based on democratic ideologies, impact traditional political cultures such as, clientelism. My intent, building on Françoise Montambeault’s (2016) insight, is to go beyond the dichotomy of clientelism and democracy by focusing on the “micro- articulations” of formal and informal power (29). State-society relations are incredibly complex and many interactions defy existing conceptual categories (i.e., clientelist, democratic, etc.).

Thus, ethnographically documenting local level articulations is a step towards constructing a non-dichotomous understanding of state-society relationships in urban Brazil. As discussed below, these research questions were analyzed using qualitative data derived from twelve months

of ethnographic fieldwork. In addition, secondary sources, such as, city planning documents, and relevant historical scholarship from local universities in Fortaleza, and community archival documents were used to complement the primary data.

The main theoretical goal of this dissertation is to bring the anthropological discussion on participatory governance in Brazil to bear on discussions surrounding political clientelism and political participation, in a context of democratization in poor urban communities. The findings of this research show that the institutionalization of civil society’s engagement with the state led to new expressions of and limitations to citizenship among Fortaleza’s urban poor. Participatory governance resulted in the diversification of urban political networks, which lessens the power of traditional clientelist patrons, but also led to the emergence of informal grassroots modes of civil-state engagement reacting to remnants of authoritarianism. The latter incited a redefinition of politics and participation based on locally relevant meanings and ideologies that were promoted in various social movements throughout the dictatorship, but today are experienced tenuously by Fortaleza’s poor residents. The diversification of local political networks pushed some clientelist patrons to institutionalize methods of exchange, often concealed within local participatory mechanisms, both formal and informal.

Through three appended articles I analyze the evolving political life of the residents of

GBJ as shaped by government intervention and a constantly changing political landscape in a context of great economic and social inequality. The first article takes an historical view of a participatory program implemented in Fortaleza in 1979 during military rule to legitimize the regime and to reduce widespread protest related to housing and land access in the city’s poorest zones. The article shows the beginnings of the erosion of what I refer to as a “politics of the street,” or embodied street-based forms of citizen protest. In the onset of what I call Fortaleza’s

‘transparent age,’ grassroots community leaders were incorporated into a “transparent” state apparatus, creating a new class of participatory citizens. This article reveals the process of the regime politicizing civic organizing via formal participation to achieve political goals. The second article documents the urbanization of clientelism, a practice common in rural Ceará, and analyzes the impacts of participatory programs on local informal political networks organized to distribute scarce public and private resources. The article shows that participatory programs cause diversification in existing political networks in GBJ, but do little to incentivize sustained civic mobilization based on democratic values. In other words, the vertical hierarchical nature of traditional clientelist networks is lessened by participatory programs that provide access to government officials via horizontal communal and political ties, but most interactions follow a logic of immediate resource access rather than sustained democratic mobilization. Finally, the third article documents two grassroots participatory organizations in GBJ to analyze how residents have asserted their own conceptions of politics and civic engagement. This article points to ways in which residents use the grassroots to preserve a ‘politics of the street’, but also reveals how their assertions of alternate definitions of politics and participation challenge clientelism and provide a social platform for rights-based demands. These informal modes of engaging the state reveal the socialization of the political, the process of using grassroots collective action to render social realities visible within state institutions.

Several crosscurrents in anthropology and political science literature guide my analysis. I rely on a wide-range of scholarly work on participatory governance in Brazil, literature on

Brazilian favelas or shantytowns, literature on political clientelism, political liberalism and transparency, and political philosophy. By putting these bodies of literature into dialogue, I intend to create a nuanced understanding of politics, participation, and citizenship in poor urban

Brazil. In this introduction, I begin with a brief historical description of Brazil’s re- democratization period to situate the origins of participation as a political and modernizing tool and then proceed with an overview of the theoretical and conceptual approaches employed.

Historical Context: Re-democratizing Brazil

From Authoritarianism to Participatory Democracy

Many of Brazil’s citizens remember the dictatorship as marked by “controlled popular civic participation by political repression and electoral manipulation” at the hands of the military regime (Holston, 2008:106). While the transition to democracy, known as the democratic opening (abertura democrática) (1979-1985) signaled an end to the regime’s most oppressive tactics, new forms of social control were implemented via participatory social policy and a cooptation of political parties that would prove damaging to democratic consolidation. To follow, I provide a brief overview of the key events that led the military regime to recognize the impossibility of permanent military rule and as a result, to create what Guillermo O’Donnell and

Philippe Schmitter (1986: 9) called a “democradura”, a limited democracy with restricted liberties and citizenship rights, a dictatorship-democracy hybrid. Thus, while a transition to democracy began in 1974, it is best viewed as a process of controlled liberalization by military elites (Hagopian, 1990).

Throughout its tenure, the military government focused on two general goals, economic development and political reorganization (Hagopian, 1996). The first meant controlling inflation and inviting foreign investment. The second, involved politically demobilizing the “popular sectors” (i.e., lower and middle classes), for example, labor unions were controlled to moderate wage demands (Hagopian, 1996:2). The regime was largely successful in excluding the popular masses from politics. Throughout the dictatorship, traditional elites “dominated subnational 16

governments” and served as “mediators at the lower levels of the political system” (Hagopian,

1996:14). Thus, civic participation was intentionally limited. Much of the regime’s political oppression was carried out through seventeen Institutional Acts or decrees (Acto Institucional,

AI), that were not annulled until the democratic opening. For example, the most violent and repressive of the decrees was the AI-5,1 in effect from 1968 to 1978. The AI-5 closed the national legislative chamber, abolished habeas corpus, and instituted the death penalty by firing squad (Tranjan, 2016). According to Tranjan (2016:53), the AI-5 was backed by the linha dura

(hard liners), the part of the military that believed their rule should not be provisional, but was rather the only solution for Brazil’s development and to stop the spread of communism. The second most repressive to political opposition was AI-2 of 1965, which imposed a bi-partisan political system. AI-2 prohibited all political parties except for two; the National Renewal

Alliance (Aliança Renovadora Nacional) or ARENA supported the regime and the Brazilian

Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro) or MDB served as the opposition.2

AI-2 allowed the regime increased authority while maintaining political legitimacy through a

“semi-democratic” or “semi-authoritarian” political order (Avritzer, 2009:43). This was further accomplished by allowing Congress to function, but by eliminating problematic Congressmen, for example. Despite these overt forms of citizen oppression, the MDB served as an umbrella organization for anti-dictatorial forces to unite during the regime. 3 However, any opposition to

1 The military was particularly angered by the more progressive factions within the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement), known as the MDB autênticos (authentics). Soon after the 1964 coup, the MDB progressives attacked the military in congressional speeches, and pushed for the creation of a commission for popular mobilization. The defiance of this group largely provoked the military to react in 1968 by first revoking the mandate of Moreira Alves, whose impeachment was rejected by two-thirds congress and then to counteract this defiance the military enacted the AI-5 causing Moreira Alves to leave the country. See: Tranjan (2016:63) for a more detailed historical overview. 2 The Law n. 6.767 of the 20th of December 1979 eliminated the bi-partisan system in Brazil. 3 The MDB was a political front that absorbed many anti-dictatorial forces and left leaning groups. For example, it included participants from the PCB – Brazilian Communist Party and the PC do B – Communist Party of Brazil, among others. The MDB was effectively the only space to express, albeit timid, political opposition. 17

the regime was controlled, for example, whenever electoral support for the MDB increased the regime would close legislative chambers, postpone elections, alter the number of senators, and take political rights from deputies (Tranjan, 2016:53). Tranjan (2016) notes that the opposition movements united under the MDB were not only reacting to the military regime, but above all sought a legitimate representative system that allowed for direct citizen participation. Thus, the movements opposed undemocratic practices such as clientelism, populism, and corporatism that existed independent of the regime. Therefore, the bi-partisan system extended the regime its semi-legitimacy, but also provided a space, albeit limited, for political opposition via the MDB that would later pressure the regime to end military rule and provided an ideological base for future participatory initiatives.

The military regime underestimated the growing influence of the MDB opposition seen in the results of the elections for senate and congress in 1974, 1976, and 1978. For example, in the

1978 direct election for Senate, the MDB received a majority of votes (52%) nationally, and

ARENA (34%), and the rest were null or blank votes (14%) (Braga, 1995:35). Additionally,

Brazil’s short lived economic boom known as the “milagre brasileiro” (1968-1974) or the

Brazilian miracle had ended, further damaging the legitimacy of the regime as Brazil’s developmental savior. During this boom period, industrial growth averaged 12.2 percent per year

(Tranjan, 2016). However, austerity measures implemented by the regime had led to stagnant salaries that did not adjust with inflation (arrocho salarial), causing increased hardship for many

Brazilians. For example, in 1980, the beginning of the “lost decade” marked by a regional economic crisis in Latin America, inflation reached 330% with no adjustment in wages to account for the increased cost of common goods (IBGE, 2010). Thus, the 1970s marked the beginning of the regime’s acknowledgement that a controlled transition to civilian rule was its

only hope to maintaining political influence and began a controlled liberalization. During the democratic opening, several key changes occurred that allowed for increased opposition to the regime.

The increased electoral success of the MDB in the 1970s pushed the Figueiredo (1979-

1985) administration to enact partisan reform in 1979, an effort meant to divide and fragment the opposition forces united within the MDB. The return of a multi-party system produced unfavorable results for the regime; new political parties emerged that provided the political space for widespread protest and movements to unite (Braga, 1995). Additionally, AI-5 was annulled in 1978, and the Lei da Anistia (Amnesty Law) was approved in 1979 which pardoned both those persecuted by the regime and those involved in the persecution, torture, and killings of the political opposition (i.e., the military). While this protected the regime by allowing many human rights abuses to go unpunished, political exiles and other prisoners could once again organize more effectively against the regime. Thus, with Brazil’s economic crisis, the annulation of the

AI-5 and the bi-partisan system, and the enactment of the amnesty law, the popular masses had increased motive and capacity for political mobilization, especially within newly formed political parties. These changes allowed municipal social movements to grow significantly in the 1980s, especially in urban centers throughout Brazil.

Because of partisan reform, in 1980 the MDB became the PMDB (Partido do Movimento

Democrático Brasileiro), the “P” representing its legal status as an official political party.

Table 1 shows the other main parties and their leaders that emerged at the end of the bi-partisan system. ARENA became PDS, and most important for participatory democracy was the creation of the Workers’ Party or PT, led by the eventual president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Political Party Leader (2003-2011). The PT carried on the

PDS – Partido Democrático Social José Sarney 1970s push for popular participation replaced ARENA. in MDB backed municipal PDT – Partido Democrático Leonel Brizola Trabalhista governments (Tranjan, 2016:62). The PTB – Partido Trabalhista Ivete Vargas Brasileiro attempt to revive the MDB’s protest of the regime was not legacy of Getúlio Vargas. PT – Partido dos Trabalhadores Luiz Inácio fragmented by partisan reform, but formed by Marxists, Intellectuals, Lula da Silva leaders of the Catholic Church. was continued in unexpected ways by Table 1: Political Parties Created After Partisan Reform in Brazil, 1979. the PMDB and the PT after 1980.

Additionally, the end of the bi-partisan system, and the rollback of AI-5 largely culminated in facilitating the scale of the 1984 protest known as the Diretas Já campaign that supported the emenda Dante de Oliveira, an amendment that would provide direct presidential elections.

Presidential elections during the regime were indirect (via electoral college4), meaning without popular votes.5 The amendment was rejected, but the millions protesting in support further weakened the base of support for the military government. This fact, among others, led to

Tancredo Neves (PMDB) winning the presidential race against Paulo Maluf (PDS) by indirect vote of the electoral college in 1986, the first civil president since 1964. Neves’ win was also

4 The electoral college included senators, federal deputies, and 132 state delegates (total of 680). See Hagopian (1996:221). 5 Institutional Act 1 created in 1964, stated that elections for President and Vice President of the Republic would be decided by the absolute majority of members in the National Congress. In 1969, the Constitutional Ammendment number 1, created the electoral college (Article 74). At this point the elections for President and Vice President became indirect. The electorate was restricted to voting for federal senators, state deputies, and vereadores of the parties ARENA or MDB. Constitutional Amendment n. 25 of 1985, re-established direct elections for president of Brazil. 20

aided by defection within the PDS, which led to José Sarney (PDS leader) aligning with the

PMDB and running as vice president on Neves’ ticket. PDS defectors such as José Sarney united in the proto-party the Liberal Front (FL), and were considered “lukewarm democrats at best”

(Hagopian, 1990:157). Neves and the PMDB gained the support of these defectors via assurances of high level positions in the post-military regime (Hagopian, 1990). In other words, with a promise of continued access to state resources to prior regime supporters. This is evidenced by a 1985 article in Veja magazine in which Neves (also an elite), promised future posts in his government to all those who supported him (cited in Hagopian, 1990:158). Thus, the pacts made during this time between the PMDB-PFL alliance effectively returned control over a range of public resources to traditional political elites. Since Tancredo Neves died (April 21,

1985) before taking office, José Sarney became the nation’s first civil president (by indirect vote) since 1964. However, the PMDB’s victory did not mean the end of the extinct ARENA party’s influence, many pro-military deputies and senators migrated to the PMDB throughout the 1980s.

This had negative impacts on the ability of the PMDB to continue its prior MDB work in pushing for social and political reform. For example, by 1986, sixty percent of the PMDB legislators opposed agrarian reform, an issue that the opposition groups united in the MDB during the regime had advocated for (Hagopian, 1990). The migration of many ARENA politicians to the PMDB during and after the democratic transition weakened the PMDB’s ability to respond to popular issues.

In sum, the 1970s marked a decline in the legitimacy of the military regime to successfully manage Brazil’s development. Regime transition was influenced by many factors, among the most influential were divisions within military factions, and the resurgence of civil society backed by the Catholic church, and associations of lawyers and journalists (Hagopian,

1990). Mounting social pressure brought on by economic crisis and a loss in several key elections to the MDB in the 1970s pushed the regime to recognize the impossibility of maintaining authoritarian rule. Constant pressure by groups united within the MDB and deals made between the military government and political elites provoked important changes; namely, the end of AI-5, partisan reform, and passing of the Amnesty Law. Ironically intended to fragment the opposition, the changes instead facilitated the transition to democracy and further weakened political support for the regime. New political parties such as the PT emerged, allowing for increased political organization against the regime and calls for popular participation. In the late 1970s, the regime began to consider participatory housing programs as a local-level approach to securing its legitimacy. This was an important political strategy considering mass urbanization expanded political citizenship and participatory social policy responded to popular calls for participation in government. However, the use of participatory programs during the transition to democracy in Fortaleza led to a cooptation of grassroots movements, causing divisions among local organizations and leaders.

The Authoritarian Origins of Participatory Social Policy

From 1950 to 1980, a process of intense rural to urban migration occurred nationwide.

For example, in 1950 Brazil’s population was 63.8% rural, in 1980 it was 67.7% urban (Braga,

1995:73). In many cases, urbanization was encouraged by the military regime via state led industrialization that eroded the rural agro-export based economy and created overcrowded cities, lacking important infrastructure, and public services, leading to civil unrest. Despite originally opposing political practices such as clientelism, after 1974, the military began to consider clientelism as a viable way to regain legitimacy. In the face of contested elections and increased social pressure from urban centers, the regime accepted to practice clientelism on a

massive scale (Hagopian, 1996: 141,151). One of the regime’s first attempts at clientelist resource distribution to the popular masses was via participatory urban housing programs. An increase is clearly seen in urban public housing between the Geisel and Figueiredo administrations. For example, in 1974, 7,831 low-income housing units were constructed nationwide and in 1980 nearly 200,000 units were constructed (Hagopian, 1996:157). Many of these units were built as part of participatory housing programs used as a vehicle for the state to politically enter civil society. The regime believed patronage based social distributions could change the dichotomous view of ARENA as the representative of the rich and the MDB of the poor (Hagopian, 1996:155). Many of these resource allocations via patronage were adapted from rural forms of clientelism to the urban sphere which presented a different political reality and expanded forms of political citizenship.

During the Old Republic (1889-1930) Brazil was dominated by regional political elites who subverted elections via political arrangements with large rural landowners who controlled the voters living and working on their land, often via private armies. Urbanization eroded the habitat of rural isolation in which this political system known as coronelismo thrived.

Coronelismo, began to decline in the 1930s and is comprised of rural land-owning oligarchs known as coronéis (colonels) who are local-level “despots” that give political support to “state governors, and federal representatives” in exchange for favors (Tranjan, 2016:34). While most colonels were large landowners, other types, such as pharmacists or other urban professionals also existed (Hagopian, 1996:48).6 However, the system was in large part upheld by Brazil’s agrarian structure and was defined by a compromise between private economic power in its

6 Hagopian (1996:48) lists seven types of coroneis in a footnote, coronel-landowner, coronel-merchant, coronel- industrialist, the coronel-priest, the coronel warlord, the coronel bandit, and the coronel-party cadre. 23

decline and a strengthened public authority (Leal, 1977:136). The typical example of the coronel is one who commands ‘block votes’ or votos de cabresto (lit. halter votes) in Portuguese. That is, the coronel’s political support comes from the “masses who eke out an existence on his land” and “live in the most appalling state of poverty” (Leal, 1977:3). In other words, the coronel acted as a political boss who “herded their peasants to the polls to vote for their preferred state and national candidates” (Hagopian, 1990:157). Thus, the coronel usurped power from property and isolated peasants, dependent on him and his land for survival. Urbanization (and industrialization) eliminated isolation and transformed the nature of coronelismo by locating public power within urban centers in which many of the poor had organized in social movements.

In the city, land ownership was no longer a direct means of acquiring political power.

However, urbanites were increasingly dependent on the state to provide employment, infrastructure, and other services. Thus, with the transition to democracy, the state became the center of clientelism in Brazil (Hagopian, 1990). As the regime began to lose elections to the

MDB in the 1970s, state clientelism became a viable way to achieve political support. New urbanites were no longer reliant on a rural coronel for their livelihood. Urbanization led to access to “primary education, mass media, market consumption, and property ownership” for many of

Brazil’s citizens (Holston, 2008:108). The increasingly literate and educated urban electorate could resist the regime’s original justification for restricting voting rights, i.e., on the basis that the poor masses could not vote intelligibly. Also, as “modern consumers,” “taxpayers,” and

“city-builders” urbanites demanded a new form of participation in government as urban citizens

(Holston, 2008:108). However, the gains in political citizenship were accompanied by limitations in civil citizenship, in the Hegelian sense, the ability to realize one’s full potential to become an

autonomous, free, and creative agent (Holston, 2008:112). Holston shows in the case of São

Paulo, that most new urban dwellers occupied land illegally, a fact that limited their civil citizenship. In this view, property ownership is part of a subjective act of appropriation, part of realizing one’s full potential via the acquisition of property. Thus, in the urban sphere a “regime of citizenship” exists in which differences in “education, property, race, gender, and occupation” create differentiated categories of citizenship (Holston, 2009:255). In other words, citizenship is a universal right under Brazilian constitutional law, but is distributed unequally. Within an auto- constructed and usually illegally occupied urban environment, segregated in periphery neighborhoods, the new urbanites organized what Holston calls “insurgent citizen movements” that “destabilize the entrenched” citizen inequalities (Holston, 2008:4). These citizens united in their state of illegality to make claims to their legal rights. It is precisely in these new spaces of citizen insurgency that the military regime intended to enter via participatory social programs.

Consequently, in 1979, the regime created the federal program PROMORAR or the

Program for the Eradication of Sub-standard housing (Programa de Erradicação da Sub- habitação). PROMORAR was launched by the now defunct National Housing Bank (Banco

Nacional da Habitação or BNH) as a nationwide project to improve living standards in favelas

(Braga, 1995:87-88). PROMORAR was federally funded, but was implemented by state governments. Fortaleza was one of the first cities in Brazil to implement the program and did so under the name of PROAFA (Programa de Assistência as Favelas da Área Metropolitana de

Fortaleza). Many residents in Fortaleza referred to PROAFA as the “program for haunting favelados”7 noting its forcible and often terrifying character in removing favela or shantytown communities. PROMORAR nationally targeted families that earned between zero and three

7 Programa de assombração dos favelados in Portuguese. 25

minimum salaries, in other words, the poorest and largest segment of Brazil’s population (i.e., the nation’s peripheries). The government’s strategy to address the crisis of urban housing, targeted the dreams of many poor urban Brazilians to become homeowners (sonho da casa própria). It also played to the leftist calls for popular participation in political processes, and consolidated a form of clientelist control in the urban sphere in which local support meant access to housing, but often required party loyalty from residents (Braga, 1995). It was a way to locally control community organization and leadership structures. As Braga states, “with PROMORAR

(among other social programs) the state intended to create a space to sustain the politics of the

[military] regime within a process of controlled transition” (1995:244). In other words, she argues that the regime expressed mea culpa for a national housing crisis, but intended to transform the urban poor into clientelist recipients and to neutralize existing social movements and community organizations. It was a way to render social protest subordinate under the pretext of guaranteeing better living conditions (Braga, 1995). Thus, many of the urban poor in Fortaleza first experienced participation in a program backed by the authoritarian regime, one they quickly found to be far from democratic. Community leaders became surrogates of state power making

“pseudo-participation” and “exchanging votes for favors” or troca de favores the new urban norm (See Paper 1). PROAFA, left stubborn remnants of clientelism and authoritarian tendencies that have created extant social divisions and complications for civic organizing in periphery communities. Other scholars have noted the vestiges of patronage by showing that clientelist practices may coexist with participatory practices implemented after military rule (Wampler,

2007; Montambeault, 2012). Participatory programs also changed the spaces of citizen insurgency, requiring participatory citizens to be insurgent within state sponsored institutions and

often outside of the periphery where community support lies. In other words, individual rather than collective participation and protest became the norm.

Thus, prior to the intense social mobilization in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the government, conceived as bureaucratic and authoritarian by many social movements, had a minimal presence in civil society. In other words, the political realm of state institutions and actors remained closed to civil society. This is evidence in Fortaleza in the 1980s when citizen movements attempted to access or occupy the Ceará state offices (Cambeba) only to find a building cordoned off by military police. However, this changed through participatory social policy, the state achieved entrance into the social sphere, the space of social movements and community organizing, but only certain recruited “citizen agents” gained (controlled) entrance to the spaces of government. This politicization of the social involved the emergence of a form of state power that acted outside what is considered the legitimate political sphere. That is, outside of the state’s official institutions and within the organization of civil society via surrogates (i.e., leaders). In this way, participatory mechanisms became the permitted space in which the social could become legitimately political. The authoritarian nature of the state was concealed politically within the social, that is within the actions of certain segments of civil society.

Clientelism played a major role in the transition to democracy in the 1980s. It not only managed civil unrest and opposition through social policy, it was also used to facilitate negotiations between elites. Hagopian (1990) has shown that “political pacts” were used during the transition to restore the power and political resources of the old regime’s civilian and military elites, a fact that he argues compromised the New Republic (post-1985 civilian regime). Thus, many of the political pacts that helped in the transition to civilian rule, included clientelist appropriations (Hagopian, 1996). This was important for the “elite” facilitation of the transition

and aided in the military securing roles in the future civilian government. It also had a weakening effect on political parties formed after partisan reform as they were soon taken over by the traditional elite politicians and former military regime supporters.

In sum, Brazil’s transition to democracy had important implications for participatory governance. In the face of increased political opposition stemming from an economic crisis, failed attempts to fragment the MDB via partisan reform, and a rollback of policies that legalized the military regime’s overt oppression of its opponents, such as the AI-5, the regime sought new forms of legitimacy. With urbanization, and a national housing crisis, it is no coincidence that the participatory projects of 1979 under the military regime focused on controlled access to housing, in which urbanites obtained housing via consensual agreements as ‘participants’ in state programs. In the absence of the coronelismo system, participatory programs provided a means of brokerage between the state and the urban poor by incorporating local leaders into the implementation of state programs. With civilian rule (post-1985) and the creation of Brazil’s democratic constitution in 1988, transparent participatory mechanisms became a legalized part of modern Brazilian techniques of governing. However, these modern forms of governance were already complicated by an authoritarian legacy of social control. With this context in mind, this dissertation brings literature on participatory governance, and modernity into dialogue with anthropological understandings of political clientelism to better comprehend the evolution of political action and citizenship in poor urban Brazil. To follow, I provide a brief overview of the three theoretical approaches employed.

Theoretical Context: Tools of Modernity in Brazil

Participatory Governance and Participation

Brazil’s use of participatory mechanisms in the 1980s and more extensively in the 1990s, coincided with the emergence of participation as a partial solution, internationally, to shortcomings in development models based on modernization theory. Within the field of development, participatory mechanisms are understood as a systematic way of incorporating

“people’s knowledge” into top-down bureaucratic planning systems (Mosse, 2001). This bottom- up approach emerged as the failures of post-war (WWII) development models, based on modernization theory, became more apparent. Modernization theory views societal development in stages of progressive movement towards “technologically and institutionally more complex and integrated forms of ‘modern society’ (Long, 1990:5). In this view, development is a project of bringing so-called ‘traditional’ societies into the modern world. Postmodern theory, emerging in the late 1980s brought a post-structural critique (see Escobar, 1992; Sachs, 1992) to development that draws on Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge formations as discourse (Lie,

2008). In other words, post-structuralism or post-development theory illuminated “the political and power aspects” within development practice (Nustad, 2001:482) by accounting for the

“knowledge, technologies, practices and power relationships that serve to order and regulate objects of development” (Lewis et al. 2003:545). Participation, as an alternative to top-down development strategies, was transformed into tangible techniques in the early 1980s. For example, rapid rural appraisal (RRA), was based on the idea that the poor and exploited should be enabled to analyze their own reality (see Chambers, 1983). RRA later came to be known as participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and participatory learning and action (PLA), used in rural development. Contrary to approaches based on modernization theory, participatory techniques 29

posit the development practitioner as a facilitator of local people’s agency to use methodological tools for “their own appraisal, analysis, planning action, monitoring and evaluation” (Chambers,

1997:103). In other words, participatory development intends to reverse the traditional hierarchies of power in development planning by deferring to local knowledge (Mosse, 2001).

Today literature on participatory governance follows four general focal points, (1) democratic decentralization, (2) deliberative democracy, (3) empowerment, and (4) self- governance (Speer, 2012). Most literature in Brazil follows the second, by viewing participatory governance as a way to improve deliberative forms of decision-making, leading to a more

“transparent and equitable” democracy (Speer, 2012:2380). Most participatory governance literature in Brazil is focused on participatory budgeting (e.g., Abers, 1998; Avritzer, 2002,

2009; Baiocchi, 2001; Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva, 2011; Wampler, 2007, 2008). My goal is to better understand citizen’s decisions to participate in various facets of political life. Not only in formal processes, such as, participatory budgeting, but also via informal participatory organizations. In this way, I respond to the hypothesis that participation may be a risk to some who fear cooptation by political actors who effectively prevent the poor from having real decision-making power over public resources (Abers, 1998; Goetz and Gaventa, 2001).

Understanding the decision-making process that precedes participation, and the after-effects of participating, is an important contribution to this body of literature.

In addition, this dissertation follows Montambeault’s (2016) premise that deepening democracy requires a significant transformation of state-society relationships, which vary by the type of mobilization patterns they encourage, and the level of autonomy they provide to participants (7). Democracy is deepened when civil society is “autonomous and inclusive,” functioning as a “nexus between society and the state” (Montambeault, 2016: 24). In other

words, deepening democracy involves a civil society that is not subordinate to the state, but is included in political institutions in a meaningful way; it is about how the state and society interact. Montambeault (2016) provides a useful typology of state-society relationships: (a) clientelist (particularistic mobilization and low autonomy), (b) disempowering cooptation

(collective mobilization and low autonomy), (c) fragmented inclusion (particularistic mobilization and high autonomy, and (d) democratic cooperation (collective mobilization and high autonomy) (7). Following this heuristic, I refer to “democratic cooperation” when using the term “democratic” and “participation.” These typologies are used in Paper 2, but serve as a guide throughout this research to better understand local experiences of state-society relationships within a context of urban poverty.

Transparency and Participatory Citizens

Framing participatory projects as a transparent tool of modern governance allows for an analysis of the variations in citizen expression that result from the basic decision to participate

(or not) in formal government sponsored programs. First, participatory programs were largely supported by the political left (i.e., the MDB and later the Workers’ Party or PT) in Brazil, but they have since often adopted neoliberal conceptions of participants. For example, projects expect citizens to establish individual forms of engagement with the state. This contrasts with a tradition of collective organizing, especially seen in the 1980s in many urban areas in Brazil, in which street-based protests put pressure on the state to act. The participatory citizen follows the idea of the “neoliberal subject,” that does not make claims on the state, but is self-enterprising, an entrepreneur of him or herself (Ong, 2006, Paley, 2001). In fact, many official participants in state programs in Brazil have received monetary compensation, creating an economy of participation. This view of the neoliberal subject aids in understanding the transformation of

collective forms of citizenship expression into individualized forms because of transparent participatory projects.

Second, as will be discussed in Paper 3, deciding to participate outside of the government apparatus, to maintain the grassroots, creates “counter-governmentalities” (Appadurai,

2013:167). These are citizens who react to the tendency of the modern state to categorize people either as rights-bearing citizens or as subjects who are constantly targets of government policy

(Chatterjee, 2004). This approach aids in understanding the population studied here, as they are often left to negotiate their rights in what Chatterjee (2004) has called “political society,” a space of contradiction in which marginal citizens are only awarded conditional rights and must innovatively negotiate with and engage the state. I add to literature on transparent politics and neoliberal governance by showing how citizens and urban spaces are re-defined and re-classified through participatory projects.

Political Clientelism: An Evolving Tradition

The final strand of literature that I employ in this dissertation is related to clientelism, a political tradition that has been a mainstay of the Brazilian political system at all levels

(Hagopian, 1990). As stated above, urbanization in Brazil caused an evolution of rural political forms within an urban reality. Clientelism is commonly understood to have (at least) three basic components, (1) a relationship between actors of unequal power and status, (2) a basis of reciprocity, a self-regulating form of interpersonal exchange in which each actor renders goods and services to the other, and (3) a dyadic relationship that is particularistic and private in nature

(e.g., Kaufman, 1974; Flynn, 1974). I situate clientelism in Fortaleza within existing literature on the subject in Brazil (Leal, 1977; Filho, 1994; Gay, 1998, Arias, 2006; Nelson & Finan, 2009;

Montero, 2010; Ansell, 2014, 2015) to fill in a gap in the literature on how clientelism is

impacted by democratizing programs such as, participatory governance in an urban sphere. It would be wrong to assume that all residents of GBJ or Fortaleza participate in clientelism, or that all participate blindly. As such, I follow Javier Auyero’s (2001) conception of clientelism as limited to the space of a broker’s inner circle. This view recognizes that partaking in clientelist exchange requires proximity (i.e., a relationship) with a political broker (usually a community leader), one who has contact with a political patron, i.e., a politician. Thus, partaking in clientelism implies building specific ties that precede an exchange for resources. Partaking in clientelism is viewed by some as normal, a mis-recognized social practice, and by others as arbitrary and simply a way to obtain needed resources. In other words, a decision to use clientelism to obtain resources is complex, involving multiple influential factors. Auyero’s more restricted view of clientelism avoids the temptation to conceptualize clientelism as an all- encompassing, omnipresent phenomenon. It is more productive to view clientelism as Gay

(1998) has suggested, an option among many, generally used strategically by the poor. To continue, I provide a description of the field site to locally contextualize the research objectives.

Field Site: Situating Grande Bom Jardim

Figure 1: Map Showing the Location of Fortaleza, Brazil. 33

There are effectively two Fortaleza’s. One is known as the site that hosted soccer fans during the 2014 World Cup, it resembles Miami’s coastline, and is known for high-end condominiums and beautiful beaches. The other, is known as the periferia or periphery, the marginal, low-income, “disordered” neighborhoods, often labeled by the city’s elite as backward and an impediment to progress. This division is seen in Figure 1 above which shows Fortaleza’s wealthiest neighborhoods marked in red and orange, closer to the coast and the periphery, marked in shades of yellow, surrounding the city’s wealthy zones. The two Fortaleza’s are further represented statistically. The 2010 version of the UN-HABITAT report (State of the

Worlds Cities) ranks Fortaleza as one of the most unequal cities in the world with an income- based GINI Coefficient of 0.61.8 Eighteen percent (n=396,370) of Fortaleza’s 2.5 million inhabitants live in what the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) calls subnormal agglomerates (aglomerado subnormal),9 referred to in popular language as favelas

(IBGE, 2013). Seventy-two of its 119 neighborhoods have a human development index below

0.5 implying low income, low life expectancy, and low access to education for most the city’s population.10 Finally, the city is plagued by high levels of violence. The 2016 annual report on

Brazilian public security published by the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública11 shows that

8 UN-HABITAT. (2010). State of the World's Cities 2010/2011 - Cities for All: Bridging the Urban Divide. London: Earthscan. 9 Defined as a community consisting of at least 51 inhabited units, most of which lack essential public services and occupy public or private land in a dense or disorganized manner. Several criteria are used to identify these areas: (a) current or recent (in last 10 years) illegal occupation of land, and (b) irregular forms of urbanization, such as, irregular street designs and lot sizes, or precarious essential public services such as, electricity, trash collection, and water and sewage systems (IBGE, 2013). 10 Measured 0 to 1, 0= lowest, 1=highest. This study was conducted in 2015 by the Municipal Secretary of Economic Development in Fortaleza (SDE). The study relied on 2010 census data to calculate a human development index (HDI) by neighborhood that considers income, education, and health/longevity in the methodology. Due to adaptations in methodology (i.e., reliance on different databases) to create the neighborhood-level index, it should not be directly compared to HDI national or HDI municipal data. 11 See: Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, (2016). Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (no. 10). São Paulo, Brazil. (http://www.forumseguranca.org.br) 34

1,651 of the 58, 547 deaths in Brazil in 2015, resulting from intentionally violent lethal crimes

(Crimes Violentos Letais Intencionais, or CVLIs), occurred in Fortaleza, the most of Brazil’s capital cities. While most violence occurs in Fortaleza’s periphery, a general culture of fear of being robbed or attacked exists throughout the city. In fact, the same annual report states that

76% of all Brazilians live in fear of being killed, thus, Fortaleza may represent an increasingly national phenomenon. While this dissertation is not about violence, this depiction of the two

Figure 2: Map of Average Monthly Income by Neighborhood Among Individuals 10 years and older in Fortaleza, Brazil (R$) - 2010 (IPECE, 2012)

Fortaleza’s, serves as the canvas that the social realities of political participation discussed herein are painted on. Many decisions, practices, and interactions among inhabitants of Fortaleza, are

undoubtedly influenced by the lived realities that these statistical extremes represent. To follow I provide an overview of GBJ’s origins, I begin with an excerpt from my field notes.

The Origins of Grande Bom Jardim

I [Ricardo] have lived in GBJ my whole life, since I was born in 1935. There wasn’t anything here at the time, just trees, streams and a few houses. Prior to the 1950s, I lived on land that was owned by a guy named Leopoldo and his wife Gilda. They let me live on their land in exchange for work. I paid with my labor. Leopoldo had a sobrado (large multi-story house), it was close to what is now Parangaba, on the other side of the bus terminal Siqueira. He would stay over there with his family, while we lived here (current GBJ). Around 1950 they found

Leopoldo hanged to death in his house, left his wife a widow, she married one of the guys that worked at the house, not me [laughing]! I helped take care of their cattle, I was only about 15 years old at the time. That was my life in the 1950s, simple. In 1956 [Gilda] sold everything to

José Gentil’s real estate company Imobiliária José Gentil S.A and all the land was divided into subdivisions (loteamentos), that’s why you have some communities named Loteamento Siqueira I and II, for example. There was another land owner, Paulo Carioca he owned the side of GBJ that is now Granja Portugal, that’s why it’s called “granja” it used to be the Carioca farm. The

Carioca family had links to politicians, I don’t think Leopoldo did, he died too soon to have those and his wife wasn’t interested. With the lots came streets, boundaries for neighborhoods, that’s when Bom Jardim was founded as a neighborhood close to 1960, after Gilda sold the land.

When the streets were put in, small shops emerged and people started selling things. Then, in

1966 buses were put in from Bom Jardim to the city center. There were only 3 buses at the time that came into GBJ along the Avenue Oscar Araripe. Before we had to walk to the main avenue

Osorio de Paiva to catch the only bus line into the city on a dirt road. It went from the towns of

Maranguape and Maracanaú to the city of Fortaleza. Before 1966, most people like me used horses to get around or a bicycle, some people still use horses. Today there is transportation everywhere, taxis, motorbike taxis, private cars, and a lot of buses. Now it’s rare that I meet any

of the original founders of GBJ,

everyone is a transplant from

somewhere. Around 1957 and 1958, I

started to see lots for sale in other parts

of GBJ, some people bought lots, but

others just invaded, especially later in

the 1980s and onward when land was

harder to find and less affordable. GBJ Figure 3: Map of Grande Bom Jardim and its Neighborhoods. Source: Valsergio Barros PROVOZ became more political towards the end

of the dictatorship. The Vereadores [city councilman or woman], and other politicians began frequenting our houses to get votes. In the

1970s and 1980s we started to have strong community leaders, we have one here in our community. Usually if he does anything he does it for himself. He was always supported by the politicians. If I needed something I couldn’t go to him for help, he would only help his family and close friends. He got the status of leader because he got us a daycare close by [crèche], it shut down after a few years though. Since 1980, people were relocated from favelas in other parts of the city because of housing policies and GBJ changed, it started to become more violent. We would start to hear of two or three people killed every few weeks. Before the 1980s we never heard anything about drugs, marijuana, but now that is all we hear about…

I stopped jotting notes as Ricardo paused to flip sausages on his street-side churrasco

(barbeque) stand that doubles as a point of good conversation, food, and drink such as carne do sol (salted steak), and cachaça. Like many of GBJ’s original residents, Ricardo worked with olaria (brickworks) in the 1960s, making telha (tile) and tijolo (brick) to construct houses for the city’s fast-growing population resulting from rural to urban migration that intensified in the

1950s and 1960s. For example, from 1950 to 1960, Fortaleza’s population grew from 270,169 to

514,818, a 90.60% increase (IBGE, 2010). As of the 2010 census GBJ had 250,000 residents, about ten percent of Fortaleza’s total population (IBGE, 2010).

Many of GBJ’s older residents remember growing up in a poor, but peaceful GBJ, memories they rely on to lessen the challenges of the current reality defined by the above-cited statistics of poverty and violence. For example, Dona Rosa, now 83 years old, arrived from the interior of Ceará as an infant in the 1930s. Like Ricardo, she remembers the original settlements being disconnected from the city of Fortaleza, resembling the rural interior. One morning in

April 2015, as I sat on her porch eating tapioca soaked in coconut milk,12 Dona Rosa laughed to herself as she described how her husband would arrive home at night, asleep on his horse, after a night of pinga (Cachaça or cane liquor) with his buddies. She sighed and said that “security was not an issue in GBJ as it is today, most people lived a simple life, but today it is all we think about.” By 2010 Fortaleza became the most densely populated capital city in Brazil and fourth in number of subnormal agglomerates, exacerbating disparities in social and economic realities

(IPECE, 2012). Ricardo said that many people could not find work in the interior, drought hurt agriculture, and people migrated to Fortaleza or to southern cities, such as, Rio de Janeiro, and

12 Tapioca is commonly eaten for breakfast or as a snack in Fortaleza. It is shaped like a small tortilla and is made from cassava starch. 38

São Paulo. As rural to urban migration increased in the late 1960s, the area surrounding Dona

Rosa’s and Ricardo’s homes became urbanized, much of the infrastructure (water systems, housing) was built by mutirão or communal labor. In Ricardo’s view, the fact that his block is now overrun with drug sale points (bocas de fumo) erodes the small achievements in GBJ such as the provision of utility services in the 1970s, including access to electricity13 and to water.14

Often, the infrastructure installed by mutirão was completed with materials received from the utility companies or from arrangements via politicians (i.e., in exchange for votes).

Compared to cities such as São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro in the more industrialized south,

Fortaleza offered limited employment opportunities for incoming rural migrants. Thus, as

Fortaleza’s population increased at an exorbitant rate, communities were constructed with little to no public planning and few opportunities for well paid jobs. Additionally, as many homes are constructed on illegally occupied land, many residents of GBJ do not possess official titles to their homes or lots, which leads to conflict over land, and low collection of property taxes that would otherwise fund improvements in the zone. To further complicate GBJ’s social reality, many residents from coastal periphery neighborhoods (i.e., Pirambu, Moura Brasil, Morro do

Ouro, Castelo Encantado, among others) which emerged as early as the 1930s (IPLANFOR,

2015) were relocated to conjuntos habitacionais (public housing projects) and other neighborhoods in the non-coastal peripheries of the city, further increasing GBJ’s population and often locating rival gangs next to each other creating increased conflict. The conjuntos resemble

13 Until 08/08/2016, the electric company was called Coelce – Companhia Energética do Ceará. Coelce was created in 1971 as a state owned company, and was privatized in 1998. It has since been taken over by the multinational energy company Enel, which currently operates in more than thirty countries. Enel serves almost four million consumers in Ceará. See: http://www.eneldistribuicao.com.br/ 14 Cagece – Companhia de Água e Esgoto do Ceará. Cagece provides water and sewer services in Ceará. The company provides water to 98.5% of Fortaleza. However, sewer coverage in Fortaleza only reaches 57.10%. See: https://www.cagece.com.br 39

vertically constructed public housing projects in U.S. cities and are usually controlled by local gangs and are known for being centers of extreme poverty and violence. Some of the largest and most impoverished in GBJ are, Juraci Magalhães, Tatumundé, Raquel Queiroz, and Miguel

Arrais.

Today, GBJ is administratively located within the Regional Executive Secretariat V

(Secretaria Executiva Regional or SER), of Fortaleza, the poorest and most populated of the city’s seven regional administrative secretariats, seen in Figure 4 below. Since 1997, Fortaleza has followed a decentralized municipal administrative model designed to manage its growing population and economic activity no longer occurring solely in the city center, represented in orange in Figure 4. SER V is home to 18 of Fortaleza’s 119 bairros (neighborhoods) and has a population of 541,511 (IBGE, 2010). “Grande” acknowledges GBJ’s residents’ shared identity,

540000 545000 550000 555000 560000 565000 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2

9 MAPA DAS REGIONAIS DE FORTALEZA 9 5 5 9 9

BARRA DO CEARÁ

CRISTO REDENTOR O CEAN PIRAMBÚ O ATL ÂNTIC VILA VELHA O

A CAIS DO PORTO ÁLVARO CARLITO G WEYNE N ARR JARDIM PAMPLONA A AIAL C MO IRACEMA E U RA R BRA A SIL PRAIA DE C IRACEMA FLORESTA VILA A JARDIM MONTE J ELLERY 0 GUANABARA CASTELO 0 0 MUCURIPE 0 0 0

8 CENTRO MEIRELES VINCENTE PINZON 8 8 8

5 PRESIDENTE SÃO GERARDO 5 9 QUINTINO CUNHA 9 A / KENNEDY T O O C FARIAS J PADRE BRITO R E QUE A A ANDRADE PAR V Á D N ÂNDIA RAX UEL A ALDEOTA E PRAIA DO O ARQ P JOSÉ PAPICU L A BENFICA O FUTURO I ANTÔNIO BONIFÁCIO U T R L BEZERRA AMADEO D Â RODOLFO E N S FURTADO TEÓFILO JOAQUIM T I GENTILANDIA TÁVORA C DIONÍSIO O PICI COCÓ TORRES FÁTIMA CIDADE DOM BELA JARDIM AUTRAN DAMAS 2.000 LUSTOSA VISTA AMÉRICA NUNES PAN AMERICANO SÃO JOÃO GENIBAÚ BOM DO TAUAPE MANUEL DIAS COUTO FUTURO DE PARREÃO BRANCO MÓ FERNANDES 0 PRAIA DO 0 R CR 0 O IT 0 CH O FUTURO II 0 HENRIQUE JORGE 0 CONJUNTO A GUARARAPES 4 CEARÁ I 4 8 MONTESE ALTO DA SALINAS 8

5 BALANÇA 5 9 JÓQUEI VILA UNIÃO 9 CLUBE JOÃO XXIII IA D ITAOCA N CONJUNTO CEARÁ II Â L O R LUCIANO E A CAVALCANTE PARANGABA EDSON QUEIROZ AEROPORTO GRANJA BONSUCESSO JARDIM DAS PORTUGAL OLIVEIRAS SERRINHA GRANJA LISBOA VILA DIAS MACÊDO PERY ITAPERI PARQUE CIDADE DOS MANIBURA MARAPONGA BOM JARDIM FUNCIONÁRIOS PARQUE

0 SAPIRANGA / COITÉ 0 DENDÊ BOA VISTA / 0 SÃO JOSÉ 0 CASTELÃO 0 0

0 JARDIM 0 8 CEARENSE SABIAGUABA 8 5 5 9 9 MANOEL SÁTIRO MATA SIQUEIRA CAJAZEIRAS GALINHA PARQUE IRACEMA CAMBEBA

O JOSÉ DE ALENCAR H IN Z E D CONJUNTO PASSARÉ IN PARQUE N ESPERANÇA A DOIS IRMÃOS C PARQUE SANTA ROSA MONDUBIM

BARROSO IÓ R U PARQUE C LAGOA REDONDA PRESIDENTE MESSEJANA VARGAS

Ú R E J A

0 U 0 G

0 PLANALTO 0

0 AYRTON SENNA 0 6 6 7 7 5 5 9 9 PREFEITO JOSÉ VALTER Legenda

COAÇU CONJUNTO PALMEIRAS Limite dos Bairros JANGURUSSU PAUPINA Regionais Fortaleza

ANCURI SÃO BENTO SER-I SER-II Localização Administração Municipal Municipal SER-III 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2

7 Caucaia 7

5 SER-IV 5 9 PEDRAS 9 Fortaleza SER-V Maracanau Eusébio PacatubaItaitinga Aquiraz SER-VI

2,5 1,25 0 2,5 Km Sercefor

540000 545000 550000 555000 560000 565000

Figure 4: Fortaleza's Regional Executive Secretariats. Source: Insituto de Pesquisa e Estratégia Econômica do Ceará (IPECE). 40

as most originally migrated from rural areas of Ceará. For example, Canindezinho (little

Canindé) is named after the interior city of Canindé. Residents usually identify with one of the many comunidades or communities that comprise each of the five neighborhoods. GBJ continues to exhibit high indices of poverty, the average income of its neighborhoods ranges from a low of

R$325 ($99USD) (Canindezinho) to a high of R$350 ($106USD) (Bom Jardim) (IPECE, 2012).

This is well below Brazil’s national minimum wage15 of R$880/month ($270USD) and several times less than the average monthly income in Fortaleza’s wealthiest neighborhood, Meireles –

R$3,660 ($1,116USD). The area’s infamy for violence and crime is reflected in GBJ’s nickname,

“o vixe,” a regionalism used to express shock or fear, roughly translated as, “eek”! The use of vixe to describe GBJ implies that its reality is shocking and should be feared. For example, when

I stated that I was doing research in GBJ, the common response among non-residents of GBJ was

“vixe” followed by a nervous chuckle.

Contrary to the stereotypes, GBJ’s nearly 240,000 inhabitants (See Table 2) are

demographically and economically diverse. Some Neighborhood Population residents live in areas akin to the traditional Bom Jardim 37,758 Brazilian “favela,” without basic infrastructure such Canindezinho 51,688 as sanitation, and mostly auto-constructed shanty- Siqueira 33,628 style homes. However, others live in modest Granja Portugal 63,324 concrete block homes, have access to an automobile, Granja Lisboa 52,808 and experience a humble, but less vulnerable Total: 239,206 livelihood overall. The term ‘favela’ is often used Table 2: Grande Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil Population by Neighborhood (IBGE, 2010).

15 At the time of this research the minimum salary was R$788/month ($250 USD), in January 2017 it increased to R$937/month ($300 USD). 41

throughout Fortaleza to describe GBJ in its entirety, many residents take offense to the homogenizing and discriminatory connotations of the term, but still use it within GBJ to refer to its most impoverished zones, and to mark socio-economic status. Most residents prefer the term comunidade or periferia to describe where they live. Periferia invokes a politicized notion of a marginalized community both physically (i.e., the outskirts) and conceptually (i.e., peripheral access to citizen-rights). Thus, the term “favela,” originally used to describe Rio de Janeiro’s iconic hillside shantytowns, misrepresents the heterogeneous (and plane) nature of GBJ’s neighborhoods. GBJ’s residents use the term favela to describe extreme realities of poverty, criminality, inadequate infrastructure, and little to no access to public services in GBJ. This includes communities such as, Marrocos, Nova Canudos, Zé do Caldo, among others. However, residents within these communities may take offense to this description.

Most of GBJ’s houses are concrete block with tiled rooves and a backyard area (quintal) used by some residents to grow basic food crops (i.e., beans, corn) or to keep livestock (cows, chickens). Many streets have open sewers; some are paved while others are dirt (terra batida).

Most families have access to at least one vehicle or motorbike, but horses and mule drawn carts are still used for transportation. GBJ has several public bus lines that are usually crowded with residents heading to or from the opposite side of the city for work in the coastal condos, businesses, and hotels. In some parts of GBJ, buses are not able to enter due to a lack of proper infrastructure, such as, roads (width, pavement, flooding, etc.). The daily transport of the blue- collar workforce from the outskirts to the city’s wealthy coastal zone led to GBJ being nicknamed “the dormitory” (o dormitório) by residents who joke about only sleeping in GBJ and spending their waking hours on the coast at work. Many residents are employed in the service sector (i.e., tourism, restaurants/bars, hotels, transportation, maids, security guards). Employment

within GBJ is limited to small shops, delivery and taxi services, construction and other manual labor, bus drivers, and administrative jobs secured in local municipal offices (i.e., health clinics, schools, social services, the local SER). The latter forms of employment are typically accessed through local political networks.

On GBJ’s Political Traditions

As a community formed by rural migrants, numerous practices in GBJ and other similar neighborhoods in Fortaleza, are preserved aspects of life in the interior. For example, many residents sit in white plastic chairs on the sidewalk in the evenings to chat. Political practices such as those common in coronelismo discussed above, have evolved as political networks and leaders in GBJ have been shaped by authoritarian rule, urbanization, and liberation theology taught by the Catholic Church. As communities formed in GBJ, leaders emerged to organize the residents to negotiate and protest for resources with politicians and other government officials.

Today, most communities in GBJ have at least one leader and often multiple leaders who are often in competition for scarce resources. Many formal participatory programs incorporate the leaders into government institutions, especially those responsible for city planning, and resource allocations. As discussed in Paper 2, this has changed the nature of GBJ’s political networks as negotiations and protest take place within the state apparatus.

Politicians frequent the community during the election cycles to employ electoral clientelist strategies, such as promising certain improvements in community infrastructure or education, or employing a cabo eleitoral (local political boss) to trade cash for votes. In contrast, relational clientelist strategies involve “ongoing benefits that extend beyond electoral campaigns” (Nichter, 2014:325), and are used more by vereadores who have a permanent institutional presence in GBJ’s neighborhoods via a local association registered as an NGO to

provide services to constituents. For example, through an association he/she can help a resident gain access to courses, healthcare, or a food basket (cesta básica), with the implicit expectation of future political support for the vereador or his/her party. These services often disguise clientelist exchanges as social welfare, but are part of a relational clientelist strategy, referred to in GBJ as assistencialismo – non-rights based social aid that targets individual needs rather than ameliorating a social reality. This obfuscation of the state’s role in citizen’s lives is further complicated by a local culture of fear generated by a complex web of violence, usually related to drug trafficking in GBJ. This fact additionally limits resident’s options to form broader social networks (i.e., intra-neighborhood ties) as most residents must operate within gang territories encompassing their communities.

While criminal gangs exist in most communities in GBJ, they rarely achieve the level of local control that the gangs in Rio de Janeiro possess in which social and political interaction with communities is closely controlled by drug traffickers acting as fixed-patrons (Arias, 2006).

Although potential for higher levels of criminal organization exists, political access to local communities in GBJ is managed by leaders. Acquiring a leader’s involvement in participatory governance initiatives is a primary goal of government officials in Fortaleza because extant urban forms of clientelism require the intermediating skills of leaders to achieve political goals.

To follow, I describe the methodological approach to what is a challenging, and often dangerous, site for research.

Methodology

This study relies heavily on ethnographic methods such as, participant observation and in-depth interviews. GBJ presents a precarious site for research. Many of GBJ’s blocks are controlled by gangs, and residents tend to avoid politically themed questions and are suspicious

of outsiders. To lessen some of these barriers to research in GBJ, I participated in the activities of the non-governmental organization PROVOZ – A VOZ DE TODOS (The Voice for all Project) 16 located within the fifth regional executive office. PROVOZ aids GBJ’s residents in voicing community concerns through non-clientelist channels. Participating in PROVOZ (explained in detail below) provided invaluable research contacts and insight into the workings of GBJ’s political networks. It also provided evidence to residents of my place within the community, an important part of gaining trust. Research subjects were identified via snowball sampling as I participated in PROVOZ and while living in the periphery of Fortaleza. Qualitative interview data provided insight into individual choices to participate in various aspects of political life in

GBJ and into the overall structure of informal and formal political networks. Secondary sources such as, city planning documents, local scholarly literature, and census and election data, were used to complement the qualitative data.

Ethnographic Fieldwork

From October 2014 to October 2015 I interviewed approximately 95 people (45 formal- audio recorded, 50 informal), including leaders, students, activists, residents, and political officials. I focused heavily on residents and public officials living and/or working in GBJ.

Snowball sampling was used to identify key political actors. Interview topics ranged from life- histories, to perceptions of politics, to resource access, to decisions to vote in elections, and to participate in programs and committees. Qualitative interview data was analyzed using

MAXQDA analysis software and was coded by relevant themes to produce a more robust analysis.

16 See: www.projetoprovoz.com 45

In the interest of prioritizing experiential knowledge, both my own and those of residents,

I relied heavily on participant observation techniques (Bernard, 2011: Chapter 12) primarily via participating in PROVOZ. PROVOZ was originally created in 2013 by residents17 of GBJ as a response and possible alternative to local clientelist politics that exacerbate chronic conditions of poverty. Brazil’s use of social technology has been influential in many of its urban areas. 18 For example, local level institutions such as the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (Pacification Police

Units) of Rio de Janeiro have been intentionally designed to change the social configuration of local communities (Yutzy, 2012). As a social technological project, PROVOZ is a participatory, bottom-up, development model in which local people become stakeholders and decision-makers in local government processes. The general goal of PROVOZ is to promote active participatory citizenship by forging more symmetrical and more equal, political relationships between residents of impoverished periphery communities and local public officials.

PROVOZ relies entirely on voluntary participation and involves a six-stage process in which participants work together to document and map local issues related to health, infrastructure, education, security, and employment, among others. Residents developed the methodological stages with supervision from development practitioners at local and international universities. The PROVOZ methodology is malleable and in a constant state of evolution. The current stages are: 1. Caminhada de rua, the PROVOZ team made up of residents canvases local

17 PROVOZ has since gained institutional support from the University of Arizona, the University of Georgia, the Federal University of Ceará, the University of Fortaleza, and the City of Fortaleza. These institutions have provided basic funding, and institutional support. 18 Brazil’s use of Tecnologia Social (Social Technology), understood as products, techniques or methodologies, developed with local community support to produce a certain social transformation, has been influential in many of its urban areas over the past decade, but has received little attention in urban anthropology and development literature. See: http://www.fbb.org.br/tecnologiasocial/

communities and talks to residents in their homes about local issues. The team documents these conversations and creates a report based on these encounters. 2. Oficina/NUAPs, residents are invited to a community meeting where they partake in community map-making exercises that depict the current state of the community and the resident’s desired changes. In this stage,

Nucleos de Aproximação (Nuclei of Approximation or NUAPs) are also formed (See Paper 3).

These groups constitute the final product of the PROVOZ process. The NUAPs function as gatekeepers to the community and negotiate directly with public officials to resolve community issues. 3. Mapas/SIG, using GIS (Geographic Information System) technology, the PROVOZ team creates digital versions of the resident’s hand-made maps that will become part of the final diagnostic report of the community. 4. Diagnóstico, the PROVOZ team creates a diagnostic report based on the field notes from the Caminhada de Rua and the Oficina. The diagnostic report is an organic document that analytically depicts the current state of local periphery communities as told by residents. This document is used as a basis of negotiation for the NUAP groups. 5. Pactuação, through negotiation with the public sector, the NUAPs form pactos, or pacts with local municipal government departments. Pacts are an informal commitment of good faith that the local government will make a reasonable effort to improve the quality of life in each local community. 6. Monitoriamento, the NUAPs actively monitor the progress of new municipal projects and initiatives in their community and receive continued support in the form of workshops and trainings from the PROVOZ team. The goal of the NUAP is to create non- clientelist channels of communication between residents and city officials while maintaining autonomy from the government.

In the initial stages of my fieldwork (late 2014), I accompanied the PROVOZ team on many of their community walk-throughs. This provided opportunities to meet residents and build

relationships. I then met with residents outside of PROVOZ and began to build my own network of contacts via snowball sampling. In this way, I could identify key informants, such as, community leaders, civic organizers, actors within clientelist networks, among others. Most recorded interviews were conducted in resident’s homes. The interviews were semi-structured and in several cases I used community mapping to identify the most important political actors in the community (see Figure 4). For example, the map below, drawn by a 35-year-old resident of

GBJ who works at an NGO, shows a local political network made of public officials, such as the vereador, the informal working class, community leaders, criminal groups, NGOs, the church, and specialized workers.

Figure 5: Community Map of Key Political Actors in Grande Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil. This information guided my research by indicating where to focus future inquiry. I eventually interviewed at least five representatives from each of the key actors indicated in resident’s

political maps. As most political networks in GBJ are not limited to one community or neighborhood, I moved throughout GBJ conducting interviews in all five of its neighborhoods.

Changing neighborhoods frequently also served as a strategy to avoid the suspicion of local drug trafficking gangs and political leaders.

I also participated in community activities such as, community markets, meetings, cultural productions, and daily household activities such as cooking family meals. This provided opportunities to observe daily life and to conduct non-structured interviews with residents.

Community events in GBJ generally occur in the evenings or on weekends, when most people are off work. Theater and music productions at local schools and the cultural center (Centro

Cultural de Bom Jardim, CCBJ) are common. Another common activity, especially for men, is to drink beer and play pool at local bars. This was one of the few spaces in which men would engage in open political discussion. Within the home men would usually refer to their wife or partner as the political expert.

In sum, participation in PROVOZ provided a way to engage and to collaborate with residents. In this way, I experienced the intricacies of everyday life and learned resident’s perspectives on participatory development initiatives and possible alternatives (Gibson-Graham,

2006). As a participant in PROVOZ and a resident in the periphery, I was an actively engaged scholar, reflecting on my own decisions and experiences while participating and interacting within the culture being researched. I took part in the mobilization of local groups and local dialogue and lived the day-to-day experience of grassroots organizing. In this way, I obtained experiential knowledge that “lets one talk from the gut” (Bernard, 2011:256) in relation to lived realities in GBJ.

Archival/Secondary Sources

To document participatory governance initiatives at the end of the military regime (1979-

1985), I relied on research conducted by the scholars at the Federal University of Ceará in the

1980s and 1990s (i.e., Braga & Barreira, 1991; Barreira, 1993; Gondim, 1993; Braga, 1995). I also reviewed relevant municipal legislation such as the City Statute, and planning documents from CEPS, IPLANFOR, IPECE, and Fortaleza 2040. These documents provided insight into the types of citizenship, and participation promoted by the state over time, ultimately impacting local level experiences. I also helped to construct and relied on maps of GBJ produced by the

PROVOZ team. These maps documented the “sentimental” boundaries of local communities and neighborhoods that differ substantially from the city’s official maps. This information guided my research by conducting snowball sampling within sentimental boundaries where common histories were shared among residents. This proved more effective as city boundaries aided more in identifying administrative limits rather than boundaries of community identity or organization.

I also used PROVOZ maps that documented existing social service infrastructure in GBJ such as health clinics, social assistance, and urgent care facilities. I found major infrastructure projects to be symbolic of a strong and well organized local political network that could negotiate more substantial neighborhood improvements. In this way, I could more accurately identify and target communities with a stronger leader or local network. I also reviewed “demands” officially recorded or protocoled with PROVOZ and the SER V office to better understand the principal needs of residents and their location within GBJ.

Analysis and Products

Through the above outlined methodological approach, I developed three main levels of analysis. Each level shows a different dimension of citizenship and participation across time and 50

formal and informal institutional space in Fortaleza’s periphery. The first level relies on historical scholarship and a systematic review of city planning documents to analyze the history of state sponsored participatory governance in Fortaleza, employed for the first time in 1979 under military rule, and shows the implications for urban citizenship and civil society-state engagement. The second relies heavily on ethnography to document an informal political network based on clientelist exchange in GBJ and its actor’s adaptations in the face of contemporary participatory programs. Finally, the third level of analysis relies on ethnography and my direct participation in PROVOZ to analyze informal or non-state sponsored participatory mechanisms in GBJ, the NUAPS and service fairs to locate new spaces of insurgent citizenship in Fortaleza’s periphery as residents attempt to socialize the political spaces of state institutions.

The analysis is developed in three articles that progress chronologically. The first article, titled “When the urban poor stop protesting: From a politics of the street to institutions of transparency in Northeastern Brazil,” analyzes the evolution of a politics of transparency in

Fortaleza, employed via participatory governance initiatives since the early 1980s. The paper relies on the case of the 1979 participatory housing assistance program Programa de Assistência

ás Favelas da Área Metropolitana (PROAFA) to analyze the use of participatory social policy during the final years of the military regime in Brazil. This paper shows that street level politics of protest and grassroots organizing common in the 1980s in many of Brazil’s urban areas, was fragmented in Fortaleza by programs like PROAFA. The institutionalization of civil society’s engagement with the state led to new expressions of and limitations to citizenship among the urban poor. By drawing attention to the authoritarian nature of participatory programs during their inception, this article frames political apathy, or one’s refusal to participate in state sponsored programs as an agentive expression of collective citizen action. That is, the

authoritarian use of citizen participation to legitimize the state created distrust and fragmented civic organization resulting in a continued refusal to participate in state sponsored programs.

The second article, titled “The paradox of participation: Political networks, participatory governance, and clientelism in Northeastern, Brazil,” ethnographically documents an informal political network in GBJ organized to provide the poor access to scarce resources, and questions the role of present day participatory governance initiatives as an alternative to clientelist resource distribution, i.e., trading one’s vote for favors. If Paper 1 revealed great citizen distrust for government programs, Paper 2 shows the resulting paradox of participation, that via urban political networks, citizens use participatory programs to increase their ability to adapt and to cope with situational vulnerability, but do not partake in sustained civic organizing or mobilization; the ideal outcome of participatory programs. In this way, I reveal an impediment to re-democratization in that a “deeper democracy,” cannot be formed by participation sustained by a demand-driven logic.

Finally, the third article, titled “Countering clientelism in Northeastern Brazil: Núcleos de aproximação and feiras de serviços as viable alternatives, examines two informal alternatives to clientelism, the núcleos de aproximação or NUAPs and feiras de serviços (service fairs). As

Paper 1 shows the erosion of collective, embodied forms of street based insurgent citizenship,

Paper 3 identifies contemporary forms of citizen insurgency or protest. Through the NUAPs local leaders infiltrate government institutions and demand an audience with public officials. In this way, they socialize the political institutions, rendering their issues hyper-visible to the state and refuse to use clientelist channels of state-society communication. The service fairs on the other hand create governmentalities from below by sharing scarce resources in street-based groups of exchange. The service fairs refuse to be politicized by clientelism or other government

programs and maintain an isolated form of citizen insurgency. Paper 3 ultimately shows how the urban poor assert their own conceptions of participation and politics despite an inherently unequal reality.

Concluding Remarks

The evolution of participatory governance as a basis for civil-state relationships in

Fortaleza and many other Brazilian cities, has been influenced by historical, political, and institutional factors. The rapid formation of Fortaleza’s periphery neighborhoods such as those of

Grande Bom Jardim, resulted from rural to urban migration and provoked an inevitable crisis in local governance as the needs of the population outweighed the capacity of the municipal and state government to adequately respond. Nationally, a shifting political scene, from authoritarian rule to re-democratization, has allowed for new forms of citizenship and opportunities for political life and citizen engagement with the state. However, re-democratization is not without its authoritarian and clientelist remnants. Participatory programs and local political networks provide a window into the workings of participation as a tool of modern governance in Brazil and reveals the resulting forms of local level civic engagement and articulations of formal and informal power. In attempting to navigate the new forms of citizenship offered in urban

Fortaleza, residents of GBJ confront participation as a paradoxical and contested field of politicized social action. On the one hand participation in state sponsored programs allows the government to enter and surveil the social sphere, and on the other it allows a limited number of citizens to access the political sphere. This is the contested site at which participation occurs, and in which urban citizenship and ‘the political’ is constantly challenged and redefined in

Fortaleza’s peripheries.

The objective of this dissertation was to contribute a better understanding of the ways in which participatory governance has impacted community level political networks, clientelist politics, and conceptions of the political. The articles included herein provide an historical and ethnographic approach to understanding participation and citizenship in Brazil’s urban peripheries. This specific case study reveals that the authoritarian origins of participatory social policy in Fortaleza led to the fragmentation of strong civic mobilization in the 1980s (Paper 1).

The resulting informal political networks consisted of ideological divisions among power holders and the common resident acting in a context of extreme resource scarcity. Fragmentation of many grassroots movements led to the use of participatory programs as a form of immediate resource access rather than sustained participation in government (Paper 2). Recent informal participatory mechanisms have emerged to assert localized or alternate governmentalities (Paper

3). These grassroots forms respond to the paradoxical nature of participation in Fortaleza’s peripheries, that it promotes civic mobilization, but often falls short by creating solutions to immediate rather than long term issues.

It is clear, in Brazil, that participatory programs have improved participation and access to services, especially among the country’s poorest communities (Abers, 2000, Wampler, 2007).

However, this research confirms Françoise Montambeault’s (2016) recent findings that participatory programs often fail to encourage “a sustainable and active form of social organization that sustains the exercise of democratic citizenship” (228). The fact that Fortaleza’s periphery residents referred to participatory housing initiatives in the 1980s as programs for

“haunting the favelado” demonstrates an historically broken state-society relationship. This is evidenced in GBJ by a great level of distrust between residents and the public sector. Thus, it makes sense that informal political networks in GBJ organize around points of resource access,

but are not incentivized to build a sustained civic community beyond the grassroots due to minimal trust in the state. Thus, state-society relationships in a context of poverty are based on a need for resources, rather than a sense of civic duty, the latter remains constrained within the grassroots where trust among members remains intact.

Furthermore, Montambeault (2016) argues that sustained participation or civic organizing is impeded by the fact that most programs target immediate problems, that, once resolved require no further participation (229). As a result, she says participation has become a consumption strategy for the poor and other groups. I have shown here that sustained civic organizing or increased capacity for collective mobilization is also impeded by an authoritarian legacy that may precede institutional design failures or shortcomings. In other words, because participatory social policy had deleterious impacts on existing grassroots organization by requiring individual and often coopting forms of participation in the 1980s, many residents see any government sponsored program as a viable threat to civil society. If nothing else, participatory initiatives used during military rule in Brazil revealed the need to mend state-society relationships. Reflecting on participatory democracy innovations in Latin America, Montambeault (2016) states, “democracy is about getting institutions right, but it is also about getting state-society relationships right”

(228). The authoritarian legacy that lives on in the social memory of many residents in GBJ impedes government trust. As such, collective mobilization occurs frequently, but in segmented and isolated forms throughout local communities, usually where the state has little influence.

An ethnographic take on participatory institutions is valuable in its ability to reveal local conceptions of politics and participation that often differ from ideologies imposed on the poor via government institutional frameworks. The broader aim of this dissertation was to better understand the role of state-society relationships in building a deeper democracy in the wake of

authoritarian rule and the forms that the articulations of formal and informal power take in the presence of participatory mechanisms. The views expressed in this dissertation challenge the notion that Brazil’s urban poor have become less participatory or passive by revealing how citizen insurgency and protest have taken new forms because of a complicated historical trajectory involving an authoritarian state and “democratic” institutions that maintain non- democratic elements. Additionally, this work goes beyond the dichotomy of clientelism and democracy to better understand the actors and relationships embedded in state-society interactions that are inherent to the transformations occurring because of participatory democracy. In the face of a shift back to the political right in Brazil, and new economic austerity measures led by the Temer administration, mending state-society relationships and providing incentives for sustained civic mobilization and engagement will be vital to ensuring equal rights for Brazil’s urban citizens. This study contributes to anthropological and political science studies focused on better understanding how such empowerment may occur or is already occurring.

Bibliography

Abers, R. (1996). From Ideas to Practice: The Partido dos Trabalhadores and Participatory Governance in Brazil. Latin American Perspectives, 23(4), 35-53.

--- (1998). From clientelism to cooperation: Local government, participatory policy, and civic organizing in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Politics & Society, 26(4), 511-537. doi:10.1177/0032329298026004004

--- (2000). Inventing local democracy: Grassroots politics in Brazil. Boulder, Colorado; London; Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Ansell, A. (2015). Democracy as the negation of discourse: Liberalism, clientelism, and agency in Brazil. American Ethnologist, 42(4), 688-702. doi:10.1111/amet.12164

--- (2014). Zero hunger: Political culture and antipoverty policy in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: University of North Carolina Press.

Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. London: New York.

Arias., E. D. (2006). Trouble en route: Drug trafficking and clientelism in Rio de Janeiro shantytowns. Qualitative Sociology, 29(4), 427-445. doi:10.1007/s11133-006-9033-x

Auyero, J. (2001). Poor people's politics: Peronist survival networks and the legacy of Evita. Durham [N.C.]; London;: Duke University Press.

Avritzer, L. (2002). Democracy and the public space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

--- (2009). Participatory institutions in democratic Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Baiocchi, G. (2001). Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment and deliberative democratic theory. Politics & Society, 29(1), 43-72. doi:10.1177/0032329201029001003

Barreira, I. A. (1993). Entre a Rebeldia e a Disciplina: Dimensões Simbólicas e Políticas nos Movimentos Sociais Urbanos. In E. P. Nascimento & I. A. Barreira (Eds.), Brasil urbano: Cenários da ordem e da desordem (pp. 165-185). Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Editora Notrya.

Baiocchi, G., Heller, P., & Silva, M. K. (2011). Bootstrapping democracy: Transforming local governance and civil society in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bernard, H. R. (2011). Research methods in anthropology: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.

Braga, E. M. F., (1995). Os labirintos da habitação popular: Conjunturas, programas e atores. Fortaleza, Brazil: Fundação Demócrito Rocha.

Braga, E. M. F., & Barreira, I. A. F. (1991). A política da escassez: Lutas urbanas e programas sociais governamentais. Fortaleza?: Fundação Demócrito Rocha com o apoio da Universidade Federal do Ceará e Secretaria de Desenvolvimento Urbano e Meio Ambiente do Estado do Ceará.

Chambers, R. (1983). Rural development: Putting the last first. Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical.

--- (1997). Whose reality counts?: Putting the first last. London: Intermediate Technology.

Chatterjee, P., (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia University Press.

Escobar, A. (1992). Imagining a post-development era? Critical thought, development and social movements. Social Text, 31(31/32), 20-56.

Filho, G. A. (1994). Clientelism and politics in Brazil. revisiting old problems. Novos Estudos CEBRAP, (38), 225-240.

Flynn, P. (1974). Class, clientelism, and coercion: Some mechanisms of internal dependency and control. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 12(2), 133-156. doi:10.1080/14662047408447207

Gaventa, J., and Cornwall, A. (2006). Challenging the boundaries of the possible: Participation, knowledge and power. IDS Bulletin, 37(6), 122–128.

Gay, R. (1998). Rethinking clientelism: Demands, discourses and practices in contemporary Brazil. Revista Europea De Estudios Latinoamericanos y Del Caribe / European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, (65), 7-24.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). A post-capitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Goetz, A.M. and Gaventa, J. (2001) ‘From consultation to influence: Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery’, IDS Working Paper 138, Brighton: IDS.

Gondim, L. M. (1993). Quando os Movimentos Sociais se Organizam: Burocracia versus Democracia Direta nas Associações de Moradores. In E. P. Nascimento & I. A. Barreira (Eds.), Brasil urbano: Cenários da ordem e da desordem (pp. 67-91). Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Editora Notrya.

Hagopian, F. (1990). “Democracy by undemocratic means”?: Elites, political pacts, and regime transition in Brazil. Comparative Political Studies, 23(2), 147-170. doi:10.1177/0010414090023002001

--- (1996). Traditional politics and regime change in Brazil. Cambridge; New York;: Cambridge University Press.

Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

--- (2009). Insurgent citizenship in an era of global urban peripheries. City & Society, 21(2), 245- 267. doi:10.1111/j.1548-744X.2009.01024.x

IBGE. (2010-2014). “Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística.” (http://www.ibge.gov.br).

IPLANFOR. (2015). Plano de Mobilidade de Fortaleza “PlanMob” (pp. 4-114, Tech.). Fortaleza, Brazil: Instituto de Planejamento de Fortaleza.

Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE. (2013). Censo Demográfico 2010: Aglomerados Subnormais Informações Territoriais. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: IBGE.

IPECE. (2012). Perfil Municipal de Fortaleza, Tema VII: Distribuição Espacial da Renda Pessoal (Vol. 42) (Brazil, Governo do Estado do Ceará, Secretaria do Planejamento e Gestão). Fortaleza, CE: Instituto de Pesquisa e Estratégia Econômica do Ceará.

Kaufman, R. R. (1974). The patron-client concept and macro-politics: Prospects and problems. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(3), 284-308. doi:10.1017/S0010417500012457

Leal, V. N. (1977). Coronelismo: The municipality and representative government in Brazil. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, D., Bebbington, A. J., Batterbury, S. P. J., Shah, A., Olson, E., Siddiqi, M. S., & Duvall, S. (2003). Practice, power and meaning: Frameworks for studying organizational culture in multi-agency rural development projects. Journal of International Development, 15(5), 541-557. doi:10.1002/jid.1004

Lie, J. H. S. (2008). Post-development theory and the discourse-agency conundrum. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 52(3), 118-137. doi:10.3167/sa.2008.520306

Long, N. (1990). From paradigm lost or paradigm regained?: the case for an actor-oriented sociology of development. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 49, 23.

Mohan, G., & Stokke, K. (2000). Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism. Third World Quarterly, 21(2), 247–268.

Montero, A. (2010). No Country for Leftists? Clientelist Continuity and the 2006 Vote in the Brazilian Northeast. Journal of Politics in Latin America, 2(2), 113-153.

Montambeault, F. (2012). When Clients Become Collective Actors: Participatory Budgeting, Changing Mobilization Patterns and Varieties of Clientelism in Recife (Brazil). In Clientelism in Everyday Latin American Politics, edited by T. Hilgers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

--- (2016). The politics of local participatory democracy in Latin America: Institutions, actors, and interactions. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Mosse, D. (2001). ‘People’s knowledge’, participation and patronage: Operations and representations in rural development. In Cooke, B. (Ed.), & Kothari, U. (Ed.), Participation: The new tyranny? (pp. 16-35). New York; London: Zed Books.

Nelson, D. R., & Finan, T. J. (2009). Praying for drought: Persistent vulnerability and the politics of patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil. American Anthropologist, 111(3), 302-316. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01134.x

Nichter, S. (2014). Conceptualizing vote buying. Electoral Studies, 35, 315-327. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2014.02.008

Nustad, K. (2001). Development: The devil we know? Third World Quarterly, 22(4), 479-489. doi:10.1080/01436590120071731

O'Donnell, G. A., Schmitter, P. C., & Whitehead, L. (1986). Transitions from authoritarian rule: Prospects for democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ong, Aihwa. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

Paley, J. (2001). The Paradox of Participation: Civil Society and Democracy in Chile. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 24(1), 1-12.

Sachs, W. (1992). The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. Atlantic Highlands, N.J; London: Zed Books.

Speer, J. (2012). Participatory governance reform: A good strategy for increasing government responsiveness and improving public services? World Development, 40(12), 2379-2398. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.05.034

Tranjan, J. R. (2016). Participatory democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and political origins. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Wampler, B. (2007). Participatory Budgeting in Brazil: Contestation, Cooperation, Accountability. University Park: Penn State Press.

--- (2008). When does participatory democracy deepen the quality of democracy? lessons from Brazil. Comparative Politics, 41(1), 4.

Yutzy, C. (2012). Increased state presence through the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora in Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro: The creation of the city’s theme park and resulting social issues. Revista de Estudos Universitários, 38(1), 127-146

61 APPENDIX A

When the Urban Poor Stop Protesting: From a politics of the street to institutions of transparency in Northeastern Brazil.

Abstract

In this paper I explore the evolution of a politics of transparency employed through participatory governance initiatives targeting impoverished periphery communities in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil. I trace participation’s conceptual and practical journey in Fortaleza, from Ceará’s 1979 participatory housing assistance program, Programa de Assistência às Favelas da Área Metropolitana de Fortaleza (PROAFA), to contemporary participatory mechanisms in the five periphery neighborhoods of Grande Bom Jardim. I show how street level politics of protest and grassroots organizing have been transformed by the institutionalization of participation in formal, transparent, government sponsored participatory organizations. I argue that the institutionalization of civil society’s engagement with the state leads to new expressions of and limitations to citizenship among the urban poor. In reaction to the individualized nature of participatory programs and to the persistence of clientelist cooptation, collective citizen identity is exercised through political apathy, a refusal to participate in state sponsored programs.

Key terms: Democracy, participation, favelas, political apathy, urban poverty, participatory governance, clientelism.

Poverty imposes some cruel regimes of rationality. One of which is how it imprisons us in a rationale of immediate survival, it takes our power to think about the future, to think strategically, to recuse the insufficient tactics of governance.

-Local Political Activist Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil

Introduction

Fortaleza, Brazil’s fifth most populated urban center and capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, is a city of paradox. Its beautiful coastline and beachfront condos conceal its ranking as the fifth most unequal city in the world, in terms of income (UN-HABITAT, 2010/2011).19 A

2013 report by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), shows that eighteen

19 Within the UN-HABITAT (2010) sample, the Brazilian cities of Goiana, Fortaleza, Belo Horizonte, and Brasilia, all have income based Gini coefficients above 0.60, making them the most unequal cities in Latin America and in the world after South Africa (73).

percent of the city’s inhabitants (n=396,370) live in what the IBGE calls subnormal agglomerates

(aglomerado subnormal),20 referred to in popular language as favelas or periferias.21 Fortaleza has the second largest population of favela residents, among Northeastern Brazilian capital cities

(IBGE, 2010), most of which live on illegally occupied land. The issue of land access and the right to decent housing (moradia digna) in Fortaleza, has generated significant popular protest, and has been traditionally most symbolic of popular struggle for a right to the city. Prior to participatory initiatives, the ‘street’ (a rua) served as the social space of collective political protest in Fortaleza’s periphery. However, the practice of a street-based politics of protest used to pressure the state to act has seemingly dwindled in the onset of what I refer to in this paper as

Fortaleza’s ‘transparent age’. This transparent age refers to a post-dictatorial time (1985-Present) of ‘participatory’ governance marked by the shifting of popular grievances from the informalities of the street to formal, participatory, bureaucratic institutions. Yet, if issues of land access, housing, and access to public services, plague the lives of Fortaleza’s poor today, it is important to ask how do periphery residents organize and act politically, or exercise their political citizenship in this ‘transparent age”? Have the urban poor accepted the shift to a formalized process of participatory governance, at the state and municipal level, as a viable solution to political and social exclusion? Also, have clientelist practices (i.e., trading votes for favors)

20 Defined as a community consisting of at least 51 inhabited units, most of which lack essential public services and occupy public or private land in a dense or disorganized manner. Several criteria are used to identify these areas: (a) current or recent (in last 10 years) illegal occupation of land, and (b) irregular forms of urbanization, such as, irregular street designs and lot sizes, or precarious essential public services such as, electricity, trash collection, and water and sewage systems (IBGE, 2013). 21 In Fortaleza, the term “favela,” carries a homogenizing and derogatory weight. It is used to describe areas of the city lacking basic infrastructure, exhibiting high indices of poverty, violence, and “backwardness.” It is often used by residents to demarcate socio-economic differences, i.e., “We are poor, but not like a favela.” Unlike the term’s original use to describe Rio de Janeiro’s shantytowns, usually built on hillsides, “favela” is reserved for Fortaleza’s worst pockets of crime and poverty. Most residents of poor zones prefer to use the term comunidade periferica or periferia (peripheral communities or periphery) to describe populations living on the margins of society, both physically and metaphorically.

adapted (or not) to participatory institutions? If so, how has this occurred? With these questions in mind, the overall goal of this paper is to better understand how street level politics, political citizenship, and grassroots collective organizing have transformed in the face of ‘transparent’ participatory governmental institutions. I argue that the institutionalization of civil society’s engagement with the state led to new expressions of and limitations to citizenship among

Fortaleza’s urban poor. For example, participatory programs require individual rather than collective embodiments of citizenship, a fact that fragments prior forms of collective civic organizing that many periphery residents relied on to exercise their right to engage the government as equals. However, one way the urban poor have maintained their collective citizen identity is by exercising their political citizenship through political apathy, a refusal to participate in state sponsored programs. This is both a reaction to the individualized nature of participatory programs and the persistence of clientelist cooptation.

I rely on the concept of the ‘politics of transparency’ to analyze how the state of Ceará and the city of Fortaleza have institutionalized channels of knowledge and communication between the state and the urban poor. These channels alter the circumstances by which citizens negotiate with and pressure the state. By contrasting forms of state sponsored participatory intervention in periphery communities under military rule, with contemporary democratic forms,

I also examine how authoritarian tendencies survive (or not) in a process of re-democratization. I rely on literature on participation during the 1970s and 1980s in Fortaleza and ethnographic data collected in Fortaleza’s periphery neighborhoods known as, Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ),22 from

October 2014 to October 2015 as a part of my doctoral research, to reveal and to analyze past and present narratives surrounding popular politics and participation. By analyzing the

22 Bom Jardim, Granja Lisboa, Granja Portugal, Siqueira, and Canindezinho.

emergence of a politics of transparency within the context of re-democratization in Brazil, I seek to contribute to scholarship on the political anthropology of the state, and in a broader sense to literature on neoliberalism in Latin America.

I use the term “transparent politics” to refer to the employment of numerous formal state or municipally sponsored forms of political participation in Fortaleza, such as PROAFA in the

1980s, and the municipal program Participação Social (lit. social participation), discussed below. Legal, or formal, forms of participation are generally discussed in the literature on participatory governance as mechanisms involving citizens in decisions related to public policy, to public expenditures, and to monitoring and evaluating government spending (Speer, 2012).

This involves the “institutional arrangements” that facilitate citizen participation (Andersson & van Laerhoven, 2007:1090), creating “participatory publics,” which link “civil society activists to formal political society” through “participatory decision-making systems” (Wampler &

Avritzer, 2004:293). I follow James Holston’s (2008) view of citizenship as “differentiated,” made of “assemblages of entrenched and insurgent forms” (33). In this view,

“counterformulations” to the political status quo are both produced and limited by historical forms of dominance. As Holston states, citizens are insurgent at the same sites in which dominance is historically entrenched, but, over time, under varied circumstances. In the case of

Brazil, I view transparent participatory projects as a technology of governing, a way for the state to manage the lives of the poor. As a technology of governing, such projects can alter the meanings assigned to citizenship. In the case of participatory programs, the poor produce calculations of themselves, they are ‘free’ to analyze and to decide the future of their realities, but within a confined bureaucratic structure with specific roles. Governing through freedom, as

Nikolas Rose has said, is central to neoliberalism - the tendencies of the state to reduce social

responsibilities and transfer them to civil society – which, as Aihwa Ong (2006) has shown,

“reorganizes connections among the governing, the self-governed, and political spaces” (14). It is my goal to contribute to a better understanding of how this “reorganizing” happens in poor communities transitioning from authoritarian, to democratic and neoliberal rule.

I begin by reviewing the literature on the “politics of transparency” and its links to neoliberal forms of state rule. After a brief history of Fortaleza’s favelas and GBJ, I rely on the scarce, but important literature, by Brazilian scholars (Gondim, 1993; Barreira, 1993; Braga,

1995) on participation in Fortaleza during the 1970s and 1980s to analyze the 1979 Ceará state housing assistance program, Programa de Assistência às Favelas da Área Metropolitana de

Fortaleza (PROAFA). This period (1979-1985) is known as the abertura democrática

(democratic opening) in Brazil; a process of controlled liberalization by military elites

(Hagopian, 1990). I provide a brief historical overview of neighborhood movements throughout the late 1970s and 1980s in Fortaleza’s periphery to show how social pressure provoked the state and municipal government’s shift towards participatory, rather than overtly authoritarian, modes of governance, beginning with PROAFA (Braga, 1995). Finally, my analysis of contemporary narratives of these interlinked issues reveals how the bureaucratization of participatory modes and clientelist meddling have redefined ‘the street’ as a space where gestures of transparency are demonstrated by public officials, requiring new forms of insurgent citizenship.

The Politics of Transparency

Globally, transparency has become one of modernity’s primary “mouthpieces,” promoting its values of openness in “democratic processes and free elections,” and incorporating its discourses into the operations of “key transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization,” to name a few (Sanders, 2003:149). I rely

on a politics of transparency, as a tool of governance, to better understand two elements of re- democratization in Fortaleza: (a) differentiated notions of citizenship and (b) the production of population and space. Beginning with the first, a transparent democratic state is defined by its ability to provide adequate information to citizens who are free to participate in political activities, making democracy akin to the rational choices of citizens in a capitalist market economy (Hetherington, 2011). Participatory governance, follows this trend by opening the state apparatus to critique and by providing clarity in its everyday operations. This impacts how citizenship is embodied and lived out among the urban poor. Transparent programs rely on a new

‘participatory class’ of citizens, far removed from a class of collective citizens pressuring the state in an embodied, street-based form. The citizen collective foments solidarity and a critical awareness of class-based oppression. Participatory projects incorporate citizens within the processes of government, and rely on participants to create solutions to societal problems.

Literature on neoliberalism has shown that the “neoliberal subject” does not make claims on the state, but is self-enterprising, an entrepreneur of him or herself (Ong, 2006, see also, Paley,

2001). This self-enterprising threatens the solidarity of citizen collectives and moves the space of critical debate from the informal to the formal sphere.

Recent literature on participatory approaches in Recife, Brazil note the tendency of programs to arise from a leftist ideology, but to espouse a neoliberal understanding of citizenship

(see: Nuijten, Koster, and de Vries, 2012). Following a liberal vein, projects expect citizens to establish individual, rather than collective, forms of relating to the state. Evalina Dagnino (2007) uses the term “perverse confluence” to describe the homogenization of meanings assigned to citizenship and participation in participatory and neoliberal projects in Latin America. As both use similar discourses of citizen-rights and rely heavily on civil society engagement, local versus

neoliberal conceptions surrounding citizenship become muddled. For example, the urban poor in

Brazil (and throughout Latin America), have relied on a notion of citizenship based on a “right to have rights,” to improve civil society’s autonomy and political inclusion, which clashes with the neoliberal conception of citizenship that tends to rely on participation that is “reduced to management” and concerned with “efficiency and client satisfaction” (Dagnino, 2007:555).

Thus, when the urban poor decide to participate, they often confront differing conceptions of citizenship and participation that have important implications for their livelihoods and their ability to operate as equal citizens.

Other cases from Latin America have revealed similar dualities; transparency tends to hide political strategies of the state’s management of populations and land. For example, Kregg

Hetherington’s (2011), analysis of Paraguay’s post-Stroessner transition to democracy, exposes a contradiction between two groups, the campesinos (peasants) and a new political class of urban professional that he calls the “new democrats,” who promote free market democracy through transparent politics and the rule of law, largely favoring the elites. Campesino leaders began to use newly available documents, such as maps and land titles, as political tools to make claims for their rights. These “guerrilla auditors,” as Hetherington calls them, demonstrated the political nature of transparent information, that land titles contained stubborn remnants of an unequal past, one full of structural inequalities that had historically barred peasants from land access.

Thus, rather than accept an apolitical transparent documentation of land titles, the guerrilla auditors turned transparency on its head by using it as a site of political contestation. Guerrilla auditing meant using documents to achieve political goals, that is, to view documents as sites in which campesino interpretations of history and rights could be negotiated with the otherwise inaccessible elites. Likewise, participatory projects in urban Brazil grant citizens access to

increased information, such as city maps, and public budgets. The site of political contestation moves from the street to bureaucratic spaces. Citizenship is not demonstrated as an embodiment of protest, but rather via an ability to rationally interpret transparent information and negotiate with the state.

Participatory programs in Brazil also re-organize space by creating “special interest zones” that designate neighborhoods as zones of special intervention due to high indices of poverty or violence, for example. Ong (2006) argues that neoliberalism relies on “spatialities of sovereignty” that produce sites and subjects through technologies of governing. Ong gives examples of China’s “Special Economic Zones” and “Special Administration Regions,” spaces of institutionalized mechanisms and procedures that create “special spaces” for labor and investment (19). While special zones undoubtedly provide a means for governments to fund needed interventions in poor communities, I am concerned with the “logic of exception” implicit in such zones. This point in neoliberal literature is important to informing the transition from military rule, in which a “logic of exception” (Ong, 2006) signified the direct control over life and death. Today, rather than discipline a population by force, as was common with the military government in Brazil, the state relies on ‘democratic’ mechanisms of governmental control targeting the way citizens think and collectively organize. In other words, one engages the state individually, as a participatory citizen, or as an inhabitant of an ‘exceptional’ zone of poverty, violence, or economic interest. In this way, ‘exception’ can be markedly positive, a step towards inclusion, but it also positions “populations and spaces as targets of calculative choices and value-orientation” (Ong, 2006:5). As participatory projects identify zones of intervention, spaces of exception, citizenship is reconfigured in a way that follows the boundaries of exception (i.e., poverty, violence, etc.), rather than those of the nation state (i.e., equal citizens of Brazil).

Exception creates variations of “urban poor people,” those who are poor in zones of violence, or poor living in high risk areas. Zones of the city and populations are classified into manageable categories. Thus, as will be discussed, non-participation is an emerging form of exercising political agency, refusing individualization, and preserving local understandings of citizenship as the freedom to be insurgent and protest the state rather than the freedom to consent to its technologies of governance. In this way, citizenship is more than possessing rights, it is the ability to exercise power (see: Postero, 2007). When government programs promote rights-based discourses in Brazil, but do not guarantee residents a way to overcome structural inequalities or institutional shortfalls, that prevent them from exercising their rights, participation is discouraged.

In Fortaleza’s periphery communities, like in Paraguay’s case or in the case of Recife’s participatory programs, using transparency to promote democracy creates varied classes and notions of citizenship. The case presented here expands on the understanding of transparency as a government technology by examining the role of participatory institutions in (re)defining urban citizenship and reproducing populations and space. It also adds to literature on democratization by addressing Jessica Greenberg’s (2010) call to view “non-participation” as an analytical lens able to demonstrate contested fields in which people “struggle to define political agency and democratic success” (44). As I show below, social movements in the 1970s and 1980s in

Fortaleza, pressured the state through insurgent expressions of their citizenship (i.e., street protest, marches, occupations), the state designed programs, such as, PROAFA, effectively institutionalized certain forms of insurgent citizenship by incorporating leaders of prior protests into the state apparatus through participatory programs, creating a new class of participatory

citizens. Ideally, PROAFA would have empowered local leaders, however, their new position as state actors rather than grassroots organizers led to a fragmentation of grassroots collectives.

In the face of an unprecedented number of participatory initiatives in Brazil, I intend to

“use the past to make an argument about the present”, to show how, despite great improvements in citizen-rights in Brazil since the 1980s, the “past always leaks through the present” (Holston,

2008:34). Projects of transparency, via structured participation, may re-produce old hierarchies, methods of exclusion or cooptation (see Kray, 2006). It is important to understand the role of

‘political apathy’ in preserving informal expressions of political agency and citizenship. To follow, I describe the historical context that gave rise to different participatory modes in

Fortaleza, eventually producing the sphere of non-participatory governance, a way of preserving

‘the political,’ especially in periphery communities.

A Brief History of Fortaleza’s Favelas and Participation

Census Year Population of Fortaleza’s first favelas arose in the 1950s

Fortaleza % Variation and 1960s, just before the beginning of Brazil’s 30- 1920 78,536 --- year dictatorship (1964-1985), and were located 1940 180,901 130.30% close to the city center or to zones of employment. 1950 270,169 49.30% Most notably, these communities included Pirambu, 1960 514,818 90.60%

1970 842,702 63.70% Poço da Draga, Cinza, and Lagamar (Braga, 1995).

1980 1,308,919 55.30% In the 1980s, however, land occupations occurred,

1991 1,766,794 35.00% primarily, in peripheral areas of the city, where land

2000 2,138,234 21.00% was less contested due to its lower value overall.

2010 2,452,185 14.68% Most of the city’s peripheral communities emerged

Table 3: Variation in Population of Fortaleza 1920 to 2010 (IBGE, 2010). as occupations on private and public lands by

families who migrated from rural zones of Ceará hoping to avoid the detriments of chronic drought in the region, among other factors. Informal, urban occupations generated significant conflict between incoming rural migrants and urban land owners, among them the municipal government, inciting a parallel process of contestation and protest before the government. For example, Fortaleza experienced a 49.4% population increase in the 1960s and 1970s (See Table

3), putting increased pressure on urban services, exacerbating the issue of urban housing (Braga,

1995:121). Nationally, Brazil’s urban population, between 1940-1980, increased from 31% to

68% and in the 1990s reached 76% urban (Tranjan, 2016:6). As of the last Brazilian Census,

Ceará’s population (n= 8,452,381) was 75% urban, slightly lower than Brazil’s national urbanization rate of 84% (IBGE, 2010). Of Ceará’s total population, 3,615,767 people, or

42.78%, live in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza (IBGE, 2010). In many cases, the military government encouraged rural to urban migration nationally by promoting an economic platform based on urban industrialism rather than export agriculture, but did not provide adequate infrastructure or public services creating a breeding ground for urban social movements

(Tranjan, 2016). Agro-technical advances and the concentration of landownership also contributed to urbanization.

As urbanization intensified in Ceará, Fortaleza’s rural-urban migrants increasingly inhabited unplanned urban zones, lacking important public services and infrastructure. In 1962, just before military rule, approximately 30,000 people marched from the littoral favela of

Pirambu to the city center (approx. 2mi.) in protest for land rights in the city (Braga, 1995). The

Pirambu march, supported by the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), was successful due to the collective level of pressure they put on the state to act, but today protests of this magnitude, originating from Fortaleza’s urban periphery, have virtually ceased to

exist. However, the Pirambu march effectively proved, to periphery communities, that grassroots organizing, and large-scale street based protest, can successfully pressure the government to act

(Braga, 1995:141). In many other urban centers in Brazil, intense urbanization produced similar social movements, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, for popular rights which intensified as urban services and infrastructure were increasingly stressed or lacking altogether. From the

1980s onward, democracy, and its institutions, were increasingly an urban question in Ceará and throughout Brazil.

Land occupations throughout Fortaleza occurred under varied circumstances. At times, certain political party officials or advisors (assessores) or neighborhood associations

(associações de moradores) would plan the occupation, considering the size of land and number

of lots needed (Braga, 1995:137).

These, ‘pre-planned’ occupations

tended to occur at night, an all-at-

once phenomenon. Interviewees in

GBJ, stated that some of the

communities in GBJ (See Figure 6)

formed by rapid occupations, but

most land was occupied gradually

Figure 6: Map of Grand Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil and its overtime, through various informal Neighborhoods. networks beginning as early as the

1930s. Social protest throughout Fortaleza, after the Pirambu march of 1962, largely declined with the dictatorship beginning in 1964 and the regimes’ subsequent dismantling of political parties and other political organizations (Braga, 1995). During this period of political closure

(fechamento politico) the Catholic Church gained legitimacy as one of the only organizing forces in local neighborhoods through the Comunidades Eclesiais de Base or CEBs. In 1980, the

Catholic Church estimated that eighty thousand CEB groups existed in Brazil creating an unprecedented base for civil society engagement (Tranjan, 2016:74).

Throughout the 1960s and through the mid-1970s the periphery residents of Fortaleza were largely viewed by the state as poor favelados, objects of state intervention (Barreira,

1993:174). In 1977, a movement known as Interbairros emerged in Fortaleza, in which the isolated forms of organization that occurred throughout much of the dictatorship began to unite

(Braga, 1995:141). Most of the land occupied throughout the 1980s in Fortaleza was public land

(federal, state, or municipal). This fact led to intensified friction between local neighborhood movements and the government. Many of the goals of the Interbairro movement responded to these frictions by organizing to provide for immediate necessities in periphery communities such as, water, electricity, and health clinics, among others.

After 1985, state and municipal social policy in Fortaleza shifted significantly to an optic of participation for residents to take part in the administration of government programs (Barreira,

1993). The shift is clearly seen in the change from residents organizing in mass to pressure the state, to becoming participants in official government programs. The protest of the removal of the favela José Bastos of nearly 2000 families (1978-1979), although unsuccessful, was one of the most significant grassroots protests since the Pirambu march. It both significantly pressured the state to reconsider its policies towards the city’s poor, and provoked self-reflection within popular movements; to consider unifying various local realities and experiences into a common struggle (Braga, 1995:143). During the 1980s three main neighborhood movements, shown in

Table 4, were prevalent in Fortaleza, the Federação de Associações de Bairros e Favelas de

Fortaleza (FBFF), the União das Comunidades de Grande Fortaleza (UCGF), and the

Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs). Each adopted different conceptual understandings and political ideologies (Braga, 1995). The FBFF was one of the more important instruments of protest and political pressure for Fortaleza’s urban poor, aiding in the struggle for housing, transportation, and utility services (Gondim, 1993:76).

Participatory Organization Form of Participation Political Affiliation

Comunidades Eclesiais de Base Systematic grassroots based. Bi- Intended to remain neutral, post- CEBs – Backed by the Catholic monthly meetings, based on 1986 some CEBs began to align with Church. critical discourse, liberation left leaning political entities, such as theology. the Workers’ Party - PT.

União das Comunidades de PT, PRC, & in 1988 PRO (Partido Grande Fortaleza (UCGF) Collective democracy, informal, Revolucionário Operário). Est. 1979 as União das street based. Comunidades, became UCGF in In 1988, consisted of 120 local 1986. associations. FBFF - Federação das Associações de Bairros e Democratizing state institutions PC do B, PCB, MR-8 Favelas de Fortaleza from within. Est. 1982.

Table 4: Influential Neighborhood Movements in Fortaleza, Brazil During the 1970s & 80s. (Adapted from: Braga (1995) and Gondim (1993)).

The goals and views on how participation should be used to affect change varied among the neighborhood movements. Those aligned with political parties, such as the Revolutionary

Communist Party – PRC and sections of the Workers’ Party – PT, emphasized direct participation, and opposed formal associations and representative mechanisms (Gondim,

1993:80). These parties opted for mass mobilization to directly confront the state through marches and occupations of public spaces. Groups aligned with one of the two main motives of movements in Brazil, at the time, to (a) democratize state institutions, this was seen in the agendas of the Communist Party of Brazil -PC do B, Brazilian Communist Party -PCB, and the

Revolutionary Movement 8th of October - MR-8, and (b) supported by the PRC and PT, to organize grassroots mobilizers, to create a decision-making process outside of the state and

political parties (Gondim, 1993). In this way, the PRC and PT viewed associations and other formal participatory modes as reproducing existing hierarchies of governance. The decision to unify existing neighborhood movements was complicated by internal conceptual and ideological differences, but also by the presence of new government programs of participatory governance.

After the reemergence of electoral politics in the mid-1970s and the surge of urban movements, the military used clientelism to coopt social leaders and curb popular contention (Montambeault,

2016:139), often via PROAFA style programs. This authoritarian thread lives on and complicates resident’s decisions to continue the protest of the streets or to become a part of legalized forms of participation (Barreira, 1993:181). That is, the conceptual and ideological divides live on.

In sum, the chronological trend that historically defined popular mobilization in Fortaleza was opposition, negotiation, and finally self-affirmation independent of the state institutional space (Barreira, 1993), emanating from a street based process of mobilization. This trend underwent significant changes in 1985 as Ceará state and Fortaleza’s municipal social policy shifted in its strategy to include resident groups as participants in the administration of programs.

PROAFA, explained in the following section, is one of the first examples of the state government of Ceará institutionalizing participation as a principal strategy for community development in Fortaleza, which resulted in a shift of the space of politics from the street to institutional programs of transparent politics.

PROAFA – Programa de Assistência às Favelas da Área Metropolitana de Fortaleza

Institutionalizing Participation

PROAFA was created by the state government of Ceará in 1979, as a mechanism to include favela residents in low income homeowner financing programs, to improve favela infrastructure (i.e., sewage and drainage systems, roads, etc.), and most important to the

argument herein, to incorporate families in the decision-making processes of local governance

(Braga, 1995:157).23 Throughout the period of military rule, Brazil maintained a two party political system; military regime supporters joined the National Renewal Alliance (ARENA), and the opposition joined the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) (Tranjan, 2016:62).

PROAFA was first implemented under ARENA governor Virgílio Távora (1979-1983) with funding from the federal initiative, PROMORAR, a project of the now extinct National Housing

Bank (Banco Nacional de Habitação, BNH). PROMORAR intended to respond to the national crisis resulting from intense urbanization throughout Brazil that had left many citizens in

“subnormal” housing conditions. The principal strategy of PROAFA, as Braga (1995) shows, was the use of participation in its design, the “favelado”, the now pejorative term for a favela resident, was considered a fundamental actor (162).

Additionally, PROAFA provoked a shift in the meanings surrounding participation as a concept. Prior to its institutionalization through PROAFA, participation in Fortaleza had often wavered between its manifestation as a pedagogical process, seen in the work of the CEBs, espoused by liberation theology, capable of altering, even bettering social realities, and a process that solidifies mechanisms of social control (Souza, 1987). Participation was, and continues to be, understood by many periphery residents in a pedagogical sense, based on a process of conscientização (consciousness raising)– a continual process of critically comprehending one’s reality. This view of participation conflicted with the way in which many in Fortaleza’s periphery understood state-backed participatory intervention in their communities, as a social process enacted by an outside agent requiring consent to carry out its activities (Souza, 1987).

23 PROAFA was implemented under the governors of Ceará, Virgílio Távora (1979-1983) and Gonzaga Mota (1983-1987) it was deactivated during the administration of Tasso Jereissati with the State Law No. 11 732, of 09/11/1990 (see: Braga, 1995: Chapter 5).

Souza (1987) argues that participation as consent is problematic; participation is “not just a question of the poor,” but rather “a question to be reflected upon by all social groups, in not just reproducing a particular order, but influencing an inherently social question” (81). Thus, from the perspective of many periphery residents, participation should take an antonymic stance to processes of domination and to the concentration of power. Souza’s (1987) definition of participation, as a mechanism to influence general social questions, reveals its potential to

(re)distribute, rather than, reproduce power.

In the late 1970s, the neighborhood associations in Fortaleza played a large role in protecting the peripheral vision of participation through internal practices (i.e., meetings, discussion, debate, etc.) and external practices (i.e., neighborhood walk-throughs, petitions, etc.) to negotiate with the state (Braga, 1995:115). At the same time, the protest and eventual removal of the residents of the Favela José Bastos, mentioned above, demonstrated the need for a shift in social policies used to address the issue of housing and land access as social pressure challenged the state’s legitimacy. In sum, by bringing a government institution to the street level, PROAFA put to test the conflicting views of participation as conscientização versus consent to government policy, issues that were already held in contention among existing urban movements.

PROAFA’s Participatory Legacy

PROAFA’s main years of operation (1981-1983) occurred during the administration of

Brazil’s last military president, Gen. João Figueiredo (1979-1985). The project preceded the period known as the Nova República (1985-90) which began in 1985, with the first civil president since 1964, José Sarney, and ended shortly after the creation of the Brazilian constitution of 1988 and the establishment of direct elections for president in 1989. While community based assistance models undoubtedly aided some, they were clearly used nationally

by pro-military to “bolster its legitimacy” and to “deactivate agents of social contention”

(Montambeault, 2016:139). Similar trends are seen in PROAFA’s intervention in local communities.

During PROAFA, five housing projects (conjuntos habitacionais) were constructed and

5,626 families were relocated from twenty different favelas in Fortaleza (Braga, 1995). Besides investments in infrastructure, PROAFA’s goals focused heavily on social investment before and after the housing projects were constructed. PROAFA incorporated residents within the planning phases of the project to ultimately re-incorporate civil society. Braga (1995:180) shows that the state’s version of participation occurred under the following circumstances; (1) state technicians would lay out plans for development, the technical aspects rendered comprehensible for residents in local meetings, and (2) this occurred in absence of a discussion of the plans, on an equal playing field, the goal was rather focused on minimizing conflict and resistance from residents to the plans themselves, i.e., to acquire consent. I view the latter as “tutored participation,” – teaching residents how to incorporate government policy into their lives - a mechanism that, in

Braga’s (1995:181) view is used to “deliver the invisible power of the state” through housing policy reform. Sitting in similar community development meetings in GBJ today, one will constantly hear the rebuff, “this approach is too technical,” by many resident’s referencing the tendency of the state to use participation as a form of tutelage, of gaining consent, rather than providing spaces for democratic participation that assume residents to be of equal status.

After the construction of the conjuntos, PROAFA funded the construction of a community center in the new communities. Social agents (agentes sociais) chosen from within the community (usually local leaders), were also trained by PROAFA, these individuals were employed by PROAFA and served as the main link between the community and the government

(Braga, 1995). Some scholars of this time in Fortaleza (see: Barreira,1993) argue that the shift from residents organizing to collectively pressure the government to becoming increasingly involved as individual participants in implementing official government social policy programs, led to a certain impediment of grassroots organizing. How would the autonomous views of residents hold their weight before those of the state’s technical experts? Or, as Braga (1995) rightfully points out, why did PROAFA ignore the already existing community organizations and leaders by constructing new community centers (183)? This fact put existing community leaders in a difficult position, one I believe they confront today, to choose between a much-needed government stipend or salary or communal solidarity. I believe this to be the origin of an extant split between leaders who are believed to inform the government or “sell out” (se vendem) and those who have remained loyal to local associations and to the grassroots. I agree with Barreira’s

(1993) argument that formally employing local leaders led to a new class of lideranças in many periphery communities, namely the emergence of the political leader (liderança política), at the head of a new ‘participatory’ class of citizens. This is evident today in GBJ. Residents use

‘liderança política,’ to describe leaders who have abandoned the politics of the street and rather make demands, deals, and negotiate on a personal basis with political officials in charge of specific government offices or programs. This often creates conflict between periphery residents who believe politics must arise from a critical politics of the street (i.e., insurgent citizenship), and those who consent to participation in its rational bureaucratic forms of formal institutionalization. In this view, a decision to participate is politically charged, and thus, a risk to most residents as it positions them politically.

Local political networks, especially those based on clientelism, quickly organized around many of the formal avenues for participation. For example, prior to institutionalized forms of

participation, residents collectively embodied social demands through various, usually themed, manifestations that were presented to the public administration. With the formal process of participatory administration/governance, residents must categorize social issues per specific government sectors or secretariats (Barreira, 1993:181). In this way, demands are negotiated directly with specific government offices and the need to collectively represent the issues on a large scale is lessened.

In sum, government programs, such as, PROAFA effectively rationalized protest through the categorization of local issues by government sectors, the street ceased to be a space of mobilization and became rather a demonstration of disorder rather than citizen engagement.

Thus, the goal of protest shifted to a need to fit periphery social woes within the specific limits of each government office or program, requiring new forms of knowledge. Those most ready to perform this mediating function on behalf of local communities were the local lideranças who had long been in communication with government officials through social organizing and understood these structures more intimately. The move of participation and negotiation with the state from the street to bureaucratic institutions, created new capacity qualifications for political participation, the most evident being one’s ability to access and interpret forms of knowledge and social ties needed to become a legitimate participatory citizen. The street was an equal social space in the sense that one’s physical presence in embodying the issues was sufficient to gain access. In contrast, access to bureaucratic institutions requires specific relationships, among other criteria, to negotiate legitimately with the state. Barreira (1993) describes this transition in

Fortaleza, from the perspective of a Foucauldian notion of discipline: “Gradually new interactive mechanisms changed this chronological logic [of grassroots protest] to a more disciplinary form, an institutionalization of demands through representative entities.” (my translation) (183).

As will be shown in the following narratives from GBJ, the division between those who participate formally and those who struggle to maintain the street (rua) as a place to create and to elaborate politics remains evident in Fortaleza’s periphery today. These divisions are further complicated by the evolution of clientelism’s urban form which has allowed certain political officials to manage grassroots organizing via political proxies in local communities.

Transparency and Participation Today

On a daily basis, we are hostage to a form of power that doesn’t dialogue. –Juliana, 27-year-old university student, Bom Jardim.

Today, options for residents of GBJ to participate in formal government processes are abundant. Many participatory government initiatives in Fortaleza rely on popular councils

(conselhos populares) and other groups of civil society representatives with various degrees of institutionalization. Formal initiatives are generally sponsored by the municipal government

(prefeitura) and managed by seven regional executive secretariats or SERs.24 GBJ is part of the

SER V, the most populated and one of the city’s poorest districts. The municipal initiative called

Participação Social (lit. social participation) run by the Coordenadoria Especial de Participação

Social (CEPS), is one of the largest participatory strategies operating in GBJ. CEPS is the extant version of the participatory budgeting program implemented under Workers’ Party Mayor

Luizianne Lins (2005-2012). According to the program’s director at the SER V, “the program holds meetings in local communities with the intent of listening to local issues, to document the principal difficulties of the community.” The director states that the program’s success depends

24 Secretaria Executiva Regional or SER, created in 1997 with the Municipal Law n. 8.000 which reorganized the municipal administration into decentralized regions designed to manage the increasing population base and economic activity occurring outside of the city center. The SERs have the following objectives: manage and assess public policies, develop socioeconomic studies, elaborate technical projects for municipal secretariats, promote analysis of proposed municipal measures, develop initiatives for the public, among other duties determined by the city government (Prefeitura) of Fortaleza. See: http://www.fortaleza.ce.gov.br/.

on a partnership with approximately 860 community leaders in the SER V. Those who are not leaders are less likely to participate in the meetings, he claimed. CEPS divides Fortaleza into thirty-two “territories of citizenship” (territórios da cidadania) each with numerous citizen agents (agentes de cidadania) representing local communities. GBJ’s neighborhoods pertain to territories 19, 20, and 21 and possess a combined total of 62 citizen agents, most are women (42 female, 20 male).25 Citizen agents are elected by local communities, most are part of the 860 community leaders in the SER V. Thus, CEPS continues the PROAFA trend of relying on

“agents” as local representatives, but goes beyond by creating territorial designations of citizenship. The CEPS coordinator at the SER V stated that mostly the same people participate independent of the government initiative or program. Since PROAFA, local leaders remain the main participants in government programs.

“Non-formal” avenues of participation also exist in GBJ. These include NGOs, and neighborhood associations. For example, the Rede DELIS,26 is a federation style network comprised of thirty-five organizations operating in GBJ. A few of the more prominent include the Centro de Defesa da Vida Herbert de Sousa (CDVHS), Movimento de Saúde Mental

Comunitária,27 and international actors such as, World Vision. The Rede DELIS generally adopts a left-leaning political ideology and maintains a critical stance towards the state and formal government participation. Thus, the opportunity to participate, formally and non-formally exists, but the ideological divides surrounding participation and citizen engagement common in the PROAFA era remain.

25 Territory 19 neighborhoods: Conjunto Ceará I, Granja Portugal, Conjunto Ceará II, and Genibaú. Territory 20 neighborhoods: Siqueira, Granja Lisboa, Bom Jardim. Territory 21 neighborhoods: Conjunto Esperança, Parque Presidente Vargas, Canindezinho, Parque Santa Rosa. See: http://dados.fortaleza.ce.gov.br/ 26 Rede de Desenvolvimento Local e Integral Sustentável do Grande Bom Jardim. 27 http://www.msmcbj.org.br/

The goal of most formal participatory initiatives is to create direct and transparent links between the popular masses and the state. These forms of participation solidify a “new kind of relationship between the state and civil society,” and in so doing redefine the “political domain and its participants” (Alvarez, Dagnino, & Escobar, 1998:1). In GBJ, this process of redefinition meant that urban forms of clientelism had to adapt to the new channels of communication created between local communities and the government. Clients are no longer under the control of a rural land-owning oligarch or coronel, but rather live in urban territories overseen by numerous municipal vereadores (sing. vereador) (city councilman or woman).28 Subsequent interviews in GBJ reveal that pre-existing patron-client networks in local communities adapted to the new urban participatory programs in several ways. First, many of the vereadores in GBJ created their own community organizations, usually registered as NGOs, which provide a variety of services such as technical courses, workshops, transportation to clinics, access to healthcare, among others. Second, the vereadores, through their associations, typically hire local leaders and their allies to function like the PROAFA “social agents” in the 1980s. The leaders introduce vereador sponsored initiatives and aid in electoral campaigning in local communities. Third, residents who receive services from a vereador-backed organization become indebted to the corresponding political network. Once aligned politically, residents who wish to participate in a formal participatory initiative require approval from the network’s community leader or vereador, in many cases. Furthermore, transparency’s goal of supplying increased information is disrupted by local political leaders who vie for control of these flows. In other words, the 860

28 Vereadores are elected for a period of four years, but they do not have a re-election limit. Fortaleza currently has forty-three vereadores. The vereador is part of the legislative branch of city government (Poder Legislativo) and is responsible for creating city laws and monitoring the executive actions of the mayor (Prefeito) and the expenditures of the city (Prefeitura). Vereadores are not elected to a specific zone of the city, but maintain established networks in local communities.

community leaders working in formal programs, linked to specific politicians, tend to render their communities transparent to the government rather than the other way around.

Haunted by an Authoritarian Past

Residents of GBJ are generally suspicious of the motives behind local projects asking for their participation. Many remember the implicit goal of projects during military rule that sought consent to local projects and aided in demobilizing grassroots collectives. Thus, many residents describe local projects as coopted, forms of social control, reflecting a similar discourse to that of the PROAFA era. These suspicions are upheld by clientelism’s adaptive capacity to transparent politics. Felipe a university student in GBJ, claims that the vereadores manage participatory projects in GBJ through what he calls “regimes of dependence:”

The traditional form of domination that characterizes the vereadores is their

service [prestação] to the community, without this he/she is not a ‘good’

vereador. This is also what traditionally characterizes clientelism, you need a

specific regime of dependence, especially in poorer areas, in which the links of

dependence are strong. For example, here we have the vereador José do Carmo,

his only link to Bom Jardim is his desire to be vereador. He had money, he came

and talked with the lideranças, well we say he paid them off, and then provides

services to the community like medical services, wheelchairs for the disabled,

food baskets [cesta básica], courses, transportation to the hospital, etc. All of the

dependency links start here and are institutionalized in his local foundation

(Felipe, Personal Communication, 2015).

In the face of transparent participatory institutions, political patrons have institutionalized their methods of exchange, often through NGOs. This strategy alters the dyadic nature of the

exchange, traditionally between client and patron, to client and institution. Felipe’s description of a vereador backed foundation, shows that clientelism adapts by promoting modern ideas surrounding equal access to goods and services, but creates an institutionalized form of dependence. This leads to residents like Felipe being suspicious of local associations in general

(i.e., NGOs, neighborhood associations), further hindering spaces of grassroots collective organizing and solidarity. In other words, contemporary forms of clientelism in GBJ simultaneously promote transparency by providing needed services and avenues for participation in local projects through local foundations, and in so doing, institutionalize and obscure the relationship between patron and client. It is not always apparent that one is entering an exchange relationship when interacting with such institutions. Felipe explains that the process of institutionalizing clientelism in GBJ has its own logic, which benefits from extreme resource scarcity:

This process [institutionalizing clientelism] has a practical logic of efficiency. The

vereador creates an efficient link between absolute lack of resources and direct

access to services, like healthcare, and even employment. So, people are going to

go after the most effective way to access resources, they are not going to look to

the ideal system of republicanism, universal access to services through a public

sphere. This type of foundation or association of the vereador is an electoral crime

in Brazil, but if an assassination is hard to prove, who’s going to say anything?

(Felipe, Personal Communication, 2015).

Residents who refuse such services often do not participate formally in politics as a way of opposing local impositions often backed by government officials. Thus, when residents confront transparent projects, they assume it is simply a new way of hiding these processes of traditional

social control. If these organizations operate on a premise of dependency, meaning those who use the services are supposed to vote for the political sponsor, it is not hard to understand residents’ suspicions that official municipal projects would be of the same nature and intent.

Marileni a middle-aged mother of three children and an activist during the time of

PROAFA, lamented, “The street used to be a place where we organized, we would burn tires in protest, and act as a collective to show our strength as citizens.” When asked about the options for participation today, she recounted a view like Felipe’s:

Look, the vereadores finance the neighborhood associations, the NGOs, they even

create their own NGOs. The legal designation of ‘NGO’ lets him [the vereador]

use his power more effectively. They are always aligned with the current mayor;

they rarely oppose the mayor in office. Look at Didi Mangueira, [another

prominent vereador in GBJ] he never opposes any of the mayors, because they

[vereador] need that structure of power to maintain their own politics. The

vereadores divide the territory among themselves, they even use the participatory

policies that the mayors create to their advantage, they use these initiatives to

benefit and promote their own political platform. Then, if you are a leader, what

can you do besides ask the vereador for the few things he/she will actually give?

So, you see leaders asking for asphalt on the streets, a small bridge for flooded

areas, just demands. Other groups, or other forms of participation, are not a

priority, or they are viewed as oppositional, because they challenge the influence

of a given politician or the influence of leaders in different communities. There is

no real collaboration, so why get involved in that? (Marileni, Personal

Communication, 2015)

Marileni’s view provides evidence that participation as consent to a given politician’s political strategy is more common than participation as conscientização in GBJ. This is further seen in the way in which the space of the street has shifted from a medium for collective claims making (i.e., burning tires, collective protest) to a symbolic political icon (i.e., asphalted streets) signifying, in some cases in GBJ, a relationship between its residents and a political patron.

Rather than the chronology of participation as conscientização – opposition, negotiation, and self-affirmation independent of the state – one sees residents hoping that their community leader will successfully negotiate (individually) the fulfillment of their demands with the state. The chronology of a participation of consent begins with demands, negotiation, and deal-making

(fechando um pacote) and generally occurs between established leaders and public officials.

Murilo, a pastor at a Catholic Church in GBJ described this process while we waited out an afternoon rainstorm in his church:

The politician makes a package deal [fechar pacote] with a leader, let’s suppose

package X is made before the election in October. It includes August, September,

and October, and is worth R$3,000, some are worth more. This means the leader

will work to organize the local people in his/her territory to support that politician.

Meetings are setup in the community with the politician, and the residents attend

to show support for the leader, who needs to create support for the politician. The

people in the meeting usually register their names, electoral zone, etc. to

document their support. If elected, the politician will provide some of the agreed

demands to that leader’s community. (Murilo, Personal Communication, 2015)

Murilo remembers the grassroots protests in GBJ during the 1970s and 1980s, but he said, today it’s a different story:

You only know people’s [political candidates] motives after they are elected. We

try to go after our rights [without using political ties], we try to get asphalt, and

rights to sewage systems, proper infrastructure, but no one helps with these

things. If you want to get housing through social assistance, you must be linked to

an association [politically sponsored], and vote for the person in charge of the

program in our area. This keeps us subordinate to them [politicians]. (Murilo,

Personal Communication, 2015)

Murilo is aware of ways in which he can institutionally voice his concerns within the municipal government, but he said most people have given up after years of little response and evidence that local leaders can obtain resources more effectively through negotiations with politicians or through local institutions. Most residents conclude that organized social pressure on the state is no longer viable, thus many unite via their apathy towards the state, opposing its attempts at citizen incorporation.

In sum, many of the former grassroots leaders in GBJ, effectively become a part of the state when they take positions as “citizen agents,” among other formal participatory positions.

Additionally, institutionalized participation intends to create alternatives to clientelist networks as the main providers of public knowledge and resources. However, especially in periphery communities where resource scarcity is greater, political patrons often distribute services through local associations, sometimes registered as non-governmental institutions (NGOs). While these services provide essential aid to many families, they place new restrictions on political citizenship by ignoring fundamental citizen rights. In Brazil, such restrictions, have worked

historically to uphold a ‘citizenship of differences’ (Holston, 2008:104) usually through

‘capacity qualifications,’ used to distribute political rights differentially among citizens. For example, while leaders have access to negotiate with the state, many residents do not possess the social capital needed to represent their community before the government. In this sense, transparent government programs limit expressions of political citizenship in a way that a street based politics did not. The process of qualifying participants is managed through existing patron client networks, i.e., the patron, typically a public figure, assigns his/her clients, typically local leaders, to participate in government initiatives. Or leaders have cultivated and maintained their symbolic value as the legitimate broker between their community and the state. As such, political participation and thus, certain forms of citizenship remain differential, rather than equal. Thus, the discourses espoused by transparent projects in Fortaleza promote accountability and efficiency in the provision of public services, following contemporary global conceptions of

“good governance,” but often result in unequal realities, given their inability to fully account for clientelist politics at the local level and to incorporate the non-leader class of citizens.

Conclusions: Reconnecting with the Street

In this paper, I have shown how formalized processes of participatory governance have slowly eroded street-based politics and have institutionalized civil society’s engagement with the state. Participation as conscientização, based on the influence of liberation theology in the 1970s and 1980s, remains in constant tension with its alter ego, participation as consent, a remnant of authoritarian rule. The state produces its legitimacy, in part, through the institutionalization of transparent citizen engagement. This means that a decision to participate in formal programs is also a legitimizing act, one that many of GBJ’s residents refuse to perform. By reviewing the emergence of a politics of transparency in Fortaleza in the 1980s, via PROAFA, I uncovered a

process of delegitimizing spaces of informal, street based politics. As techniques of transparency transformed a political problem (land access) into a technical, bureaucratic problem to be solved.

It was not a question of a, “right to have rights,” it was a right to rationally partake in the planning phases of community intervention alongside expert technicians.

I relied on the concept of the “politics of transparency” as a tool of governing, with neoliberal influences, to analyze the rationalization of popular grievances. Participatory programs fit grievances within specific institutions of urban planning, popular councils, among other modes of transparent governing. Legalized forms of participation, initially used to legitimize the military government by promoting the façade of an open, and inclusive relationship with civil society, relied on participation as consent rather than one of equality or justice promoted in groups like the CEBs and political parties such as, the PT. As legalized forms of participation became more prevalent throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (i.e., PROAFA,

Participação Social, etc.), especially after the inclusion of participatory governance in the

Brazilian constitution (1988), Fortaleza’s periphery residents increasingly struggled to incorporate their prior street- based claims into formal participatory mechanisms. Clientelism or patronage, has evolved, due to rural-urban migration in Ceará, (primarily to Fortaleza) to become further consolidated in an urban environment wrought with poverty and resource scarcity. The militaries use of political patron and client relationships remained largely in-tact in the formation of Fortaleza’s peripheries. Community leaders within participatory projects formed closer ties with powerful political patrons, usually municipal vereadores, further fragmenting large-scale grassroots mobilization. Clientelism adapts by exploiting the neoliberal tendency of the state to transfer some of its roles to civil society and a growing base of NGOs. This is clearly seen in the cases referenced by Felipe, in which the vereador uses the Third Sector – others being the State

and the Market (Dagnino, 2007) – to provide services to residents, at times part of negotiated deals (pacotes) with lideranças. The problem is that participation (i.e., in the Third Sector), becomes associated with achieving minimal needs for survival and does not further discussions on social equality or justice or the ability to be co-participants with the state in shaping their own reality. Furthermore, the adaptive capacity of clientelism to the Third Sector (i.e., politically sponsored NGOs) ensures that political power, at least in the case of many vereadores in

Fortaleza, is upheld by regimes of dependence and not balanced by an informed electorate with guaranteed citizenship rights. In this sense, the historical tendency of the military government to implicitly control grassroots organizing through social assistance programs is reproduced in localized contexts and remains part of the collective memory of many residents. Clientelism shares an unnerving compatibility with neoliberalism, both promote a model designed to ensure client-satisfaction rather than universal rights. This ultimately ensures that Fortaleza’s peripheral citizens rely on a rationale of immediate survival.

Today, participants in formal participatory programs tend to be local lideranças who possess the relationships, and knowledge needed to broker and mediate bureaucratically with the state, forms of social capital that a politics of the street did not require. Thus, like the case of

Hetherington’s (2011) campesinos in Paraguay, a politics of transparency often requires the poor to participate in their own marginalization, legitimizing governance through formality, while indirectly delegitimizing grassroots approaches to pressuring the state to otherwise improve local livelihoods. The result is a trend of non-participation in many of Fortaleza’s periphery communities, easily mistaken for passivity. Since PROAFA, the types of institutions promoting participation have changed, but the division between participation as conscientização versus consent, has not been fully reconciled. Most residents either do not occupy the proper social

position to negotiate politically in the formal sphere, or choose not to participate and relegate their engagement to, usually, anonymous forms of street level organizing among neighbors, friends, and family. Viewing non-participation as agentive exposes these forms as expressions of resistance to the political status quo. Amidst a landslide of participatory initiatives, both in Brazil and globally, the question of how to re-connect the formal sphere to a politics of the street remains. This ultimately means “unperverting” Dagnino’s “perverse confluence” by recognizing the local notions of participation and citizenship that often conflict with those of the state and

Third Sector. Additionally, mechanisms to account for clientelism’s adaptation to transparent participatory governance must be considered in the design of participatory initiatives.

References

Alvarez, S. E., Dagnino, E., & Escobar, A. (1998). Introduction: The Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social Movements. In S. E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, & A. Escobar (Eds.), Cultures of politics/politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements (pp. 1-32). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Andersson, K., & van Laerhoven, F. (2007). From local strongman to facilitator: Institutional incentives for participatory municipal governance in Latin America. Comparative Political Studies, 40(9), 1085-1111. doi:10.1177/0010414006288977

Braga, E. M. F., (1995). Os labirintos da habitação popular: Conjunturas, programas e atores. Fortaleza, Brazil: Fundação Demócrito Rocha.

Dagnino, E. (2007). Citizenship: A perverse confluence. Development in Practice, 17(4-5), 549- 556. doi:10.1080/09614520701469534

Greenberg, J. (2010). There's nothing anyone can do about it": Participation, apathy, and "successful" democratic transition in post-socialist Serbia. Slavic Review, 69(1), 41-64.

Hagopian, F. (1990). “Democracy by undemocratic means”?: Elites, political pacts, and regime transition in Brazil. Comparative Political Studies, 23(2), 147-170. doi:10.1177/0010414090023002001

Hetherington, K. (2011). Guerrilla auditors: The politics of transparency in neoliberal Paraguay. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE. (2013). Censo Demográfico 2010: Aglomerados Subnormais Informações Territoriais. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: IBGE.

IBGE. (2010-2014). “Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística.” (http://www.ibge.gov.br).

Kray, C. A. (2006). Resistance to what? how?: Stalled social movements in Cancun. City & Society, 18(1), 66-89. doi:10.1525/city.2006.18.1.66

Montambeault, F. (2016). The politics of local participatory democracy in Latin America: Institutions, actors, and interactions. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Nuijten, M. C. M., Koster, M., & Vries, d., P.A. (2012). Regimes of spatial ordering in Brazil: Neoliberalism, leftist populism and modernist aesthetics in slum upgrading in Recife. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 33(2), 157-170. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2012.00456.x

Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

Paley, J. (2001). The Paradox of Participation: Civil Society and Democracy in Chile. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 24(1), 1-12.

Postero, N. G. (2007). Now we are citizens: Indigenous politics in post-multicultural Bolivia. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Sanders, T. (2003). Invisible Hands and Visible Goods: Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania. In H. G. West & T. Sanders (Eds.), Transparency and Conspiracy (pp. 148- 174). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Souza, M. L. d. (1987). Desenvolvimento de Comunidade e Participação. São Paulo, SP: Cortez.

Tranjan, J. R. (2016). Participatory democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and political origins. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

UN-HABITAT. (2010). State of the World's Cities 2010/2011 - Cities for All: Bridging the Urban Divide. London: Earthscan.

Wampler, B., & Avritzer, L. (2004). Participatory Publics: Civil Society and New Institutions in Democratic Brazil. Comparative Politics, 36(3), 291-312. doi:10.2307/4150132

APPENDIX B

The Paradox of Participation: Political Networks, Participatory Governance, and Clientelism in Northeastern Brazil

Abstract

For the urban poor in the Brazilian Northeast, resources such as healthcare, education, or employment, are traditionally accessed via personal relationships with public officials. This trend is known as clientelism or the trading of votes for favors. As Brazil’s Northeast became increasingly urbanized, so did forms of clientelist resource distribution, leading to diverse informal political networks. In this article, I examine how participatory governance initiatives impact informal urban political networks, organized to provide the urban poor access to scarce resources. I use the concept of “participation as a paradox” to understand how the urban poor decide to engage the state from within and from outside informal local networks. Through ethnographic narratives, I examine the diverse informal political actors that have been shaped by distinct political, economic, and ideological contexts. I show that urban political networks use participatory programs to increase their ability to adapt and to cope with situational vulnerability. I seek to contribute to discussions on the reasons for civic mobilization and political participation in poor urban communities in a context of re-democratization.

Keywords: Brazil, participatory governance, clientelism, urban poor, democratization, community leaders.

Introduction

In the impoverished neighborhoods of urban Northeastern Brazil, where access to public services and basic rights is not guaranteed, signs and cars with loudspeakers thanking public officials for newly paved streets or for new schools, among other improvements, are common.

These are representations of a political culture based on clientelism, trading votes or other political support for favors, which has been historically common in rural Ceará. Because resources, such as healthcare, education, and employment, are traditionally accessed via personal relationships with public officials, unique political networks dictating the flow of said resources have emerged and become increasingly important with urbanization. Despite endemic resource scarcity, many poor urban communities have organized to maximize access to scarce resources.

While the forms of organization vary from overtly clientelist to more democratic or equal rights-

based, many residents depend on political networks to ensure their livelihoods. Participatory programs promote equal access to government by involving citizens in municipal government and policy decisions, and have added further points of negotiation with the public sector and, subsequently, resource access. In this article, I focus on a one of the poorest zones of Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, and consider how traditional political networks are impacted by government sponsored participatory programs. For the urban poor, access to elected officials is generally determined by personal relationships, leading to differentiated access to basic citizen rights and increased marginalization for those unable or unwilling to rely on personalized access.

Here I use the concept of “participation as a paradox” (Montambeault, 2016), to analyze decisions to participate and access resources embedded in informal political networks shaped by current municipal government participatory programs. In this way, I bring literature on participatory governance into conversation with literature on clientelism in Brazil through a consideration of two questions: (1) how is clientelism, in its urban form, impacted by democratization, and (2) do participatory programs increase human capabilities to overcome existing societal and political power structures? (see: Gaventa & Cornwall, 2006; Mohan &

Stokke, 2000). By documenting the emergence of urban clientelism and informal political networks in Fortaleza, I also examine the diverse informal political actors that have been shaped by distinct political, economic, and ideological contexts shaped by re-democratization and urbanization. These networks are based on a common history of marginalization and are typically linked to a vereador (pl. vereadores) (city councilman or woman). Informal political networks in Fortaleza represent the traditional means by which many poor residents acquire resources in exchange for political support. In documenting changes since the end of authoritarian rule (1985-present), I also reveal the network’s and actor’s adaptation and

diversification in the face of participatory programs that offer alternative channels between civil society and the state. Through an analysis of narratives of several main political actors; the assessor (political advisor), the líder comunitário (community leader), the militante social

(social militant), and the voter, I argue that participatory programs cause diversification in existing political networks, but a decision to participate generally follows a logic of resource access rather than civic mobilization for equality. Thus, traditional political roles adapt to new points of resource access, and increased spaces for negotiation with the state emerge. However, the goal of participatory programs, to create citizens who live out democratic citizenship collectively, is generally not achieved. Thus, participation remains a paradox, often implying a certain risk.

By documenting an informal urban political network, mutually shaped by a clientelist past and a democratizing present, often dictating access to public resources, I seek to contribute to the broader anthropological understanding of how democratic projects, such as participatory governance, shape traditional political cultures. Recent work by political scientists such as

Françoise Montambeault (2016) suggests that participatory projects in Brazil, often follow

“individual-demand logics,” to acquire infrastructural, and other, needs (2016: 283-284). This means that traditional informal political actors may mobilize residents to demand specific infrastructural needs, but demobilize once the resources are acquired. Montambeault’s work makes a distinction between types of civic mobilization that is beneficial to anthropological research, namely, when civic mobilization in poor communities is used as an adaptive measure, to obtain resources, and when it is used as an exercise of equality based on sustained civic cooperative action or collective organizing. This aids in understanding the varied results of participatory programs in Brazil and internationally.

I begin with a brief overview of the literature on participatory governance in Brazil and its use as a mechanism for social change and democracy. After an introduction to the research site, I provide a historical overview of how clientelism evolved from its rural to urban form as many of Ceará’s rural inhabitants migrated to Fortaleza during the 1950s and 1960s. I then ethnographically examine the primary actors in an informal political network, each confronting a clash of traditional politics and democratic interventions through participatory programs.

Participatory Governance in Brazil

Participatory governance is an important step in Brazil’s re-democratization process, following extensive political suppression during its military dictatorship (1964-1985).29

Beginning as a global trend in the 1990s, participatory governance is a mechanism for creating direct citizen participation in public policy processes, making government institutions more

“accountable, legitimate, and responsive” (Speer, 2012:2380). Since 2000, Brazil has passed important federal legislation that has provided new options for its citizens to participate politically. The most influential change, in this vein, is the 2001 federal law known as the City

Statute (Estatuto da Cidade), that requires Brazilian municipalities (above 20,000 inhabitants) to create a Master Plan (Plano Diretor) for urban development based on popular participation in planning. Many of Brazil’s participatory models precede the City Statute law, most originated in the 1980s, but were not fully institutionalized in Fortaleza until the 2000s.

Research on participatory governance in Brazil, suggests that it can lead to more democratic political systems by strengthening deliberative forms of decision-making, thus, improving government policy overall (Speers, 2012; see: Abers, 1998; Avritzer, 2002, 2009;

Baiocchi, 2001; Wampler, 2007, 2008). Participatory budgeting (orçamento participativo or

29 See Paper 1 for an historical view of the emergence of participatory governance mechanisms in Fortaleza during the final years of the military regime.

OP), is Brazil’s most renowned experiment in participatory programs. OP is most studied in

Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, where it has been implemented since 1989 (Abers, 1998). OP, generally a year-long decision making process, involves citizen engagement in the negotiation of spending on public works projects (Wampler, 2008) and has been adopted in more than 150

Brazilian municipalities (Montambeault, 2016). Citizen engagement generally occurs via community forums, local councils and community debate.

In participatory governance literature, in general, a “paradox of participation” refers to a difference in the underlying reasons for and outcomes produced by one’s participation. I rely on two paradoxes revealed in Montambeault’s (2016) study of participatory budgeting in Porto

Alegre and Belo Horizonte, the paradox of equality and the paradox of participation as “guichet politics.” The former refers to the fact that the inclusionary design of participatory programs may reproduce, rather than erode, inequalities. This implies that the institutional design of participatory programs may not fully account for the underlying inequalities and power dynamics in poor urban communities that often impede autonomous and equal participation in government sponsored participatory programs. For example, many participatory programs in Brazil give a limited number of program roles to residents as “citizen-agents,” among other titles, that only a small portion of residents of a poor community will fill. Those who do not become official representatives may feel incompetent and auto-exclude themselves from participating and become apathetic outside “citizen-observers” (Montambeault, 2016). The paradox of guichet politics recognizes the redistributive logic of participatory programs, that participatory processes generally determine resource flows to vulnerable local communities. This may occur through community debate or participatory budget design, for example. Montambeault states that this can lead to participation based on a “logic of individual demands” that discourages long term civic

100

mobilization and engagement. Thus, some participants may be motivated by a personal or communal interest in obtaining public resources. This poses a paradox for participatory processes that intend to create strong and sustained collective citizen mobilization, but may instead incentivize individualism when participation is motivated by individual demands. This means that participants mobilize and demobilize around specific needs, and use participatory programs as a guichet, a place to simply obtain resources rather than a mechanism to build a collective citizen identity. Such paradoxes inherent in OP and other participatory programs may create “multiple citizen trajectories” that differ from those intended in the institutional design of participatory programs (Montambeault, 2016:295). In other words, the reasons behind the varied logics of citizen participation and the different expressions and meanings of citizenships that emerge often differ from the program’s original intent and merit closer analysis. For example, it is possible that participatory programs lead to increased opportunities for the poor to cope with poverty, rather than to receive public resources as an exercise of citizen rights or create a more autonomous and more equal civil society.

Furthermore, as the urban poor in Northeast Brazil are embedded in traditional practices of marginalization, usually at the hands of political patrons, thus opportunities to dialogue with public officials outside of clientelist channels are rare. Participatory programs often involve a

“balancing act” between citizens putting pressure on the state as participants, and government officials delegating (or not) authority to civil society (Wampler, 2008). Not all participants will possess these negotiating skills. As shown in Paper 1, the traditional stance of many low-income residents in Fortaleza towards the state in the 1970s and 1980s, followed the ideology of liberation theology, which, in contestation of military rule, sought to challenge the state from outside. In contrast, current participatory programs require that citizens cooperate with

101

government officials from within the state apparatus. This ultimately involves new forms of pressuring the state from within, to properly ‘balance the act’ of wagering resources and to ensure that communal views are respected. Thus, while these new institutional arrangements between the state and civil society allow (in theory) for the “deliberation of citizens as reasonable equals,” (Baiocchi, 2001), it remains unclear when this is viable in practice. In other words, further research is needed to explain why, in some cases, the paradox of participation leans towards equality and in others towards guichet politics or individual-demand logics. The latter is essentially an institutionalization of clientelist favor exchanges or troca de favores, i.e., demands determine what is traded to the poor. In many of Brazil’s poor communities, the

‘balancing of interests’ traditionally occurs between a politician and a community leader. A deliberative process that grants authority to citizens to translate the preferences of their communities into government policy ultimately changes the pre-existing political culture by allowing increased access to the public sector. Understanding such changes is important to deepening our understanding of these new “participatory modes of governing” (Caldeira &

Holston, 2015) that are often employed with a limited understanding of local power dimensions, a point this research intends to shed light on.

In participatory governance literature, relatively little is understood about the underlying reasons for civil society participation. This points to a need for studies that reveal the “structural and individual-level explanations for the collective action of civil society actors” (Speer,

2012:2385). For example, Montambeault (2016b) uses a comparative approach to analyze five cases of participatory institutions in Brazil and in Mexico. She shows that participatory democracy innovations lead to differing mobilization processes (i.e., collective or individual), and varied degrees of participant autonomy (i.e., controlled to autonomous). For example, of the

102

Brazilian cases, her study revealed that in Belo Horizonte, participatory budgeting led to collective mobilization and autonomous participation, but in Recife, the same program produced controlled participation based on clientelist relationships (Montambeault, 2016b:45-46). Given that the literature on participatory programs in Brazil shows varied results depending on local histories and extant realities, a first methodological step that anthropology is adept to pursue via ethnography is to understand existing political realities from the perspective of local communities. Building on this understanding, one can reveal how political cultures and ways of interacting with the state may be modified by specific participatory programs, and furthermore, why success may vary. The study presented here expands on Paper 1 by analyzing an informal political network to reveal the contemporary role of participatory programs in shaping reasons for popular participation in the political sphere. It adds to the literature on participatory governance by revealing the varied logics behind participation and in turn provides a better understanding of the paradoxes of guichet politics and (in)equality known to result from some participatory initiatives in Brazil. This ultimately improves the understanding of the reasons surrounding collective action of civil society actors and resulting expressions of citizenship.

This study is based on qualitative data collected during twelve-months of participatory ethnographic research. From October 2014 to October 2015 approximately 95 people were interviewed (45 formal audio-recorded interviews and 50 informal), including community leaders, students, activists, residents, and political officials. Snowball sampling was used to identify key political actors. Interview topics ranged from life-histories, to perceptions of politics, to resource access, to decisions to vote in elections, and to participate in programs and committees. This data provided insight into individual choices to participate in various aspects of

103

political life and into the overall structure of informal political networks. Secondary sources such as census and election data, were used to complement the primary data.

The study site consists of five neighborhoods, known as Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ), and is located on the southwestern edge of Fortaleza (see Figure 7). A coastal city, Fortaleza is known as Brazil’s “Miami,” thus, many of GBJ’s resident’s work in the service sector, in coastal hotels, in restaurants, and in other blue collar jobs. Despite serving the local elite, and wealthy tourists, on a regular basis, GBJ’s residents are stereotyped as part of a crime-ridden, welfare dependent, population; a drag on the city’s progress. Fortaleza is the fifth most unequal city in

the world in terms of income

distribution,30 and Brazil’s fifth

most populated capital city (n= 2.5

million) (IBGE, 2010). Many of

GBJ’s nearly 250,000 residents left

the drought-ridden interior of Ceará

in the 1950s and 1960s, in search of

improved livelihoods in Fortaleza.

However, Fortaleza did not offer the Figure 7: Grande Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil and its Neighborhoods. level of employment opportunities that were common in the more industrialized south, such as in the cities of São Paulo or Rio de

Janeiro.

Today, GBJ is an example of Fortaleza’s high level of economic inequality when compared to the city’s wealthiest zones. For example, the average monthly income among GBJ’s

30 See: UN-HABITAT, (2010). State of the world’s cities 2010/2011: Bridging the urban divide. London: Earthscan.

104

neighborhoods seen in Figure 7 – Bom Jardim, Canindezinho, Siqueira, Granja Lisboa, Granja

Portugal –range from a low of R$325 ($99USD) (Canindezinho) to a high of R$350 ($106USD)

(Bom Jardim) (IPECE, 2012). This is well below Brazil’s national minimum wage31 of

R$937/month ($304USD) and several times less than the average monthly income in Fortaleza’s wealthiest neighborhood, Meireles – R$3,660 ($1,116USD). Fortaleza is also the most densely populated capital city in Brazil and fourth in the number of aglomerados subnormais (irregular and/or illegal land occupations, with minimal public services), many of which are in periphery zones (IPECE, 2012). Thus, many residents of GBJ do not possess official titles to their homes or lots, which leads to conflict over land and low collection of property taxes32 that would otherwise fund improvements in the zone. Despite many improvements to GBJ in the 1970s and

1980s such as drainage systems, and access to electricity and water, GBJ’s five neighborhoods consistently rank among the city’s top-ten poorest. Extreme marginality makes GBJ an important site for the study of urban political networks and participatory programs that often determine resource allocations to a vulnerable population.

Clientelism and Rapid Urbanization: The Creation of Fortaleza’s Informal Political Networks

Clientelism or ‘patron-client relationships,’ originally understood to consist of dyadic relationships involving a defined hierarchy and a mutual exchange of resources between patrons and clients (Kobayashi, 2006), have been studied extensively by anthropologists and political scientists. Clientelism is commonly understood to have (at least) three basic components, (1) a relationship between actors of unequal power and status, (2) a basis of reciprocity, a self-

31 At the time of this research the minimum salary was R$788/month ($242USD), in January, 2017 it increased to R$937/month. 32 Known as IPTU- Imposto Predial e Territorial Urbano, a federal tax and main contributor to many municipal budgets in Brazil. IPTU is guaranteed under article 156 of the Federal Constitution of Brazil (1988), giving municipalities the right to collect the tax.

105

regulating form of interpersonal exchange in which each actor renders goods and services to the other, and (3) a dyadic relationship that is particularistic and private in nature (e.g., Kaufman,

1974; Flynn, 1974). Research on clientelism in Brazil, has focused on electoral clientelism and political development (Filho, 1994), its role in democratic consolidation (Gay, 1998), and the role of drug traffickers in clientelist networks in Rio de Janeiro (Arias, 2006b), to name a few.

While research on clientelism in Northeastern Brazil and specifically in Ceará exists (e.g.,

Nelson & Finan, 2009; Montero, 2010; Ansell, 2014, 2015), the nature of clientelism’s adaptation to democratic programs is understudied in Fortaleza’s impoverished periphery neighborhoods.

Fortaleza experienced a rapid influx of rural to urban migration between the years of

1950 and 1960, growing from 270,000 to 510,000 inhabitants (IPLANFOR, 2015) and just over fifty years later reaching 2.5 million inhabitants (IBGE, 2014). The phenomenon of mass migration to the capital city was the result of persistent drought and farmers’ inability to adapt in terms of accessing water resources which squandered agricultural livelihoods (IPLANFOR,

2015). Unlike Brazil’s southern cities such as, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, or Rio de Janeiro, urban growth in Fortaleza was driven more by “push factors (i.e., drought in the countryside) rather than by pull factors (i.e., employment)” (Garmany, 2011:48). Most farmers in rural Ceará, did not have access to credit to build adaptive infrastructure, such as irrigation systems, or to purchase land. As “non-landowning agriculturalists,” working as labor tenants, sharecroppers, and day laborers (Garmany, 2011), most farmers relied on land owning oligarchs known as the coronel (pl. coronéis) for their livelihood. The title of coronel is derived from the colonels of the now extinct Brazilian National Guard (Leal, 1977:xv). Regardless of whether a person holds the rank of colonel, the rural population (throughout Brazil) use the title for any political leader or

106

person of influence. In a similar way, in Fortaleza, public officials or influential people, are addressed as doutor (doctor), also regardless of their official educational level.

Under what was akin to a feudal arrangement between the coronel and the people living on his land, (usually in an “appalling state of poverty” (Leal, 1977:3)) minimal livelihood security was exchanged for votes to support whomever the coronel desired, this practice was known as voto de cabresto, due to the forced nature of the exchange (Leal, 1977). Voto de cabresto, literally “halter vote” is a type of "voting bloc” in which individuals were obligated to vote for whomever the coronel indicated. Failing to vote could result in violent punishment at the hands of jagunços, armed groups that defended the coronel and his land. Voting blocs in GBJ, groups voting en masse out of a shared obligation, are rare, however, in cases where a leader has negotiated crucial infrastructure with a candidate, such as, street paving, a health clinic, or a school, a larger group of voters may contribute their vote to the community cause. In general, the traditional patron-client relationship between the coronel and farmers in Ceará was not replicated in GBJ, rather, new forms of resource distribution between public officials and constituents arose.

Fortaleza’s rapid population growth led to hastily built neighborhoods, most on illegally occupied land, with little or no city planning. Without an effective communicative mechanism between civil society and the state and limited social policies designed to benefit the poor, many community leaders, usually the founders of the settlements, relied on personal relationships with politicians to access resources for their communities. Thus, in Fortaleza’s newly settled periphery communities, especially during re-democratization in the 1980s, politicians (o doutor) replaced landowners (coronel) as the patrons and the local electorate became the clients.

However, Fortaleza did not follow the trend of cities such as Rio de Janeiro, where drug

107

trafficking groups act as the “fixed-patron,” by directly exchanging with politicians for resources that are distributed within the community in return for residents’ silence and protection (Arias,

2006b:429). In this case, “collective clientelism” - an entire slum voting in exchange for community benefits is more common (Gay, 1994). Fixed-patrons, be it the coronel or traffickers,

“dominate (often forcibly or coercively) a region and negotiate the votes of a captive clientele in exchange for outside support” (Arias, 2006b:430). While drug trafficking gangs are common throughout GBJ, they do not usually engage directly with politicians, and have not achieved the same level of organization or systematic control as in the case of Rio’s favelas or shantytowns.

For example, on several occasions young men would approach me in GBJ, sometimes visibly armed, and would casually ask what I was doing. They were usually satisfied with an explanation of my research and sometimes volunteered information about the community. This contrasts to my experience in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (see Yutzy, 2012) in which gang members escorted me through the community. That withstanding, public officials interviewed for this research stated that there have been isolated cases in which a trafficker trades hits of crack cocaine (or other drugs) to addicts for votes, to maintain certain “arrangements” with politicians

(i.e., less police presence). Overall, the concept of a fixed-patron in the case of GBJ holds less explanatory value as leaders appear to take on a more cultural role of negotiating with public officials, among other entities (i.e., NGOs), and are part of a more flexible political network, encompassing multiple communities, and do not maintain a captive clientele. For example, a middle-aged shop owner in Bom Jardim stated that GBJ has too many people to control, “it is only in confined living situations like the public housing complexes (conjunto habitacional) or smaller communities that a leader or gang might have more control of residents.” In general, people participate in clientelism strategically, when in need of resources. Interviewee’s

108

descriptions of the vereador approximate the image of a fixed-patron, with a fixed area of operation, but participatory planning initiatives challenge monopolies on public resources and the public position of the vereador means that acts of coercion must be well concealed. However, the extent to which a vereador uses force or coercion to dominate a community’s inhabitants is beyond the scope of this research, it is more evident that local resource dependence, and no limits to re-election for vereador positions, provide a higher probability of re-election and virtual permanence in power.

In sum, as the rural poor left the hinterland, escaping drought and dependence on the coronel, they were faced with a different political scenario in an urban setting, particularly as the country immersed in a “democratic transition” at the end of the military dictatorship. The old clashed with the new, rights based demands of periphery residents clashed with nascent political networks in which local power is not derived from property ownership, as in the case of the coronel, but rather from the ability to control resource allocations (jobs, access to education, healthcare, etc.) and subsequently, access to citizen rights, such as, access to housing, and to the provision of basic needs. These new political interactions and resource assemblages led to a

‘neo-clientelist’ project of sorts in GBJ consisting of more flexible patron-client relationships that co-exist with participatory programs. Moreover, Brazil’s transition to democracy, has led to changes in election procedure, such as official ballots, and automated voting machines, this reduces the degree to which politicians control votes (Gay, 1998) by making it harder to identify reneging voters. Thus, while certain urban forms of control exist between patrons and clients, largely based on resource dependency, the relationship between voters and clientelist politicians is not as unequal as it was in rural Ceará. Clientelism, in GBJ, is largely engaged as a “popular political strategy” (Gay, 1998), a way for residents to lobby for resources, within a defined, but

109

more fluid network of actors. Different from an electorate captive to a patron, individuals within political networks, leaders, assessores, voters, etc., act in diverse ways to solve individual and communal problems. The urban relationship between the patron and client is less unequal and more protean than rural forms of clientelism in Ceará.

GBJ’s Political Network & Participatory Programs

Unlike the Ceará state-led participatory programs of the 1980s, which existed primarily to solve specific problems, such as access to housing (i.e., PROAFA, Paper 1), current programs are permanently institutionalized within the municipal government. For example, since 1997,

Fortaleza follows a decentralized administrative model in which the city is divided into seven regional executive secretariats (Secretaria Executiva Regional or SER), commonly called regional (pl. regionais) in Portuguese. Each SER, has an office called Coordenadoria Especial de Participação Social (Special Coordinator for Social Participation or CEPS), which holds regular meetings in communities to document and record the primary needs of residents. This information is later sent to the relevant municipal secretariat (i.e., housing, labor, infrastructure, etc.). For example, the first CEPS meeting I attended in GBJ was organized by a community leader and took place at a local church. There were approximately twenty participants, mostly middle-aged women, who sat in a circle and took turns discussing community issues with the

CEPS representative. Access to healthcare and to medicine at the clinics was the primary concern, followed by community security and infrastructure issues such as sewage flowing in the streets. While the meeting was focused on community issues, the residents seemed to make an almost sacramental offering to the CEPS representative, their would-be savior, by providing an abundance of cakes, snacks, and other food personally served. CEPS grew out of the participatory budgeting model created in 2005 under the Workers’ Party Mayor Luizianne Lins

110

(2005-2012). The Lins administration’s goal was to change Fortaleza’s political culture through

OP, by creating civic participation through assemblies, forums, and popular councils (conselhos do OP). The approach of OP and later CEPS, intends to ameliorate the prior authoritarian, and exclusionary characterization of the public sector’s relationship with civil society in Fortaleza. In addition to CEPS, Fortaleza 204033 is a new participatory mechanism that seeks to create a city development plan per short, medium, and long term goals reaching to the year 2040. The plan depends on the input of “citizen agents” (agentes de cidadania) recruited from local communities, to create six, four year, planning modules covering the next six mayoral administrations. In this way, planning goes beyond the control of the administration in power and is legally implemented through 2040. Fortaleza 2040 meetings are organized by the city government, the first one I attended in 2015 took place in an area theater hall. The attendees

(approx. 150) were almost entirely community leaders, wearing their best formal-attire. It was almost a gala style event, where the community dignitaries came to be honored and to be recognized by public officials for their local influence rather than their rights as citizens.

Traditional clientelist tendencies are challenged by programs like CEPS and Fortaleza

2040, resources for large infrastructure or other improvements are allocated through the participatory program rather than via personal relationship. Nonetheless, politicians continue to frequent GBJ, especially during election cycles. Electoral clientelist strategies, such as, promising improvements in community infrastructure or education, or using a cabo eleitoral

(local political boss) to trade cash for votes remain common in GBJ. The cabo eleitoral is, “an individual who for certain favors pledges a number of neighborhood, class, or professional votes, from urban areas to a candidate with whom he [or she] has an understanding” (Leal, 1977:15). In

33 http://fortaleza2040.fortaleza.ce.gov.br/

111

GBJ, the cabo eleitoral hands out cash for one’s promise to vote, the going rate per vote in 2015, per interviewees, was approximately R$50 ($15USD). Outside of election cycles, relational clientelist strategies - “ongoing benefits that extend beyond electoral campaigns” (Nichter,

2014:325) – are typically used by vereadores who have a permanent presence in GBJ’s neighborhoods through an association registered as an NGO. For example, through an association he/she can help a resident gain access to technical courses (sewing, electrician, carpentry), healthcare, or food baskets (cesta básica), with the implicit expectation of future political support for the vereador or his/her party. These services often disguise clientelist exchanges as social welfare, but are part of a relational clientelist strategy, often referred to in

GBJ as assistencialismo – non-rights based social aid that targets individual needs rather than ameliorating a social reality. This obfuscates the state’s role in citizen’s lives. The presence of local gangs additionally limits resident’s options to form broader social networks (i.e., intra- neighborhood ties) as most residents must operate within gang territories encompassing their communities. Generally, results from participatory programs are slow, infrastructure projects are burdened by layers of municipal bureaucracy. As many residents of GBJ are in vulnerable situations, they tend to participate in associations or programs that offer immediate benefits.

Thus, participation in GBJ, tends to follow an individual-demand logic as most consider participation as equality a luxury.

The Vereador

The first time I heard a carro de som (car with a loudspeaker used for advertisements) I was barely awake, tossing, sweating, as my flat began to heat from the morning equatorial sun.

The loudspeaker was violating my eardrums with the daily price of eggs, milk, and, chicken at the market. The second carro de som was more enticing, anthropologically, it listed the recent

112

neighborhood improvements, pavement, drainage systems, health post renovations, that the vereador had backed and negotiated for the community. By the time the third carro de som drove by I was already cooking tapioca (cassava starch tortilla) and eggs on my propane stove, it had the exact same message, but thanked a different vereador. Was this a page out of the propaganda handbook? Did one of the drivers get the message wrong? Who actually helped my new community?

Of elected officials, in Fortaleza, the vereador maintains the most extensive grassroots political networks in the peripheries, usually through contact with community leaders. The vereador is part of the legislative branch of city government (Poder Legislativo) and is responsible for creating city laws and monitoring the executive actions of the mayor (Prefeito) and the expenditures of the city (Prefeitura). In GBJ, vereadores often distort the work of the executive branch by personally carrying out local projects such as, street paving, and by distributing resources through local patron-client networks to ensure their re-election. In some cases, the vereador may falsely take credit for a public works project, such as street paving, or a new school, to prop up his/her reputation. A new vereador, Antônio Farias de Sousa, known as

Aonde É, (where is it), was elected in 2012. Aonde É, has a pizza delivery business in GBJ; as he walks down the street to deliver pizzas he yells, “aonde é,” asking where the customer’s house is.

Known as the shouting pizzaiolo, and a native of GBJ, Aonde É was elected to vereador because of his visibility among residents, but was found guilty in 2014 of misappropriating public funds and went to prison for forty-one days.34 Aonde É, was found guilty of hiring fictitious assesores and personally collecting their salaries. Interviewees said it was a shame, because, “all the

34 See: http://g1.globo.com/ceara/noticia/2016/09/processado-na-justica-ex-vereador-onde-e-tem-registro- indeferido.html

113

vereadores in GBJ steal public funds, Aonde É just didn’t know how to not get caught.” This view, reveals the general “dirty” nature that many residents assign to politics in Fortaleza.

Vereadores are elected for a period of four years, but they do not have a re-election limit.

Fortaleza currently has forty-three vereadores and according to João Miguel, who works for a vereador in GBJ, their salaries range from R$13-14,000 per month ($3,950-$4,260 USD), well above Brazil’s national minimum salary. While vereadores are not elected to a specific zone of the city, most have established networks in local communities. Most residents are aware of the prominent vereador in their area. To follow I provide ethnographic depictions of the non-elected actors in GBJ’s political networks, defined as individuals who engage the formal state apparatus on a regular basis. I provide contextual details from my field notes to complement the interview data.

The Assessor –Refém da Politica Partidária

João Miguel

My head was lightly rattling against the bus window while it maneuvered the dirt road near a large conjunto habitacional (public housing apartment building). It was dusty, smelly, and hot as hell. As exhausted as I was from a long day of interviews, I hardly realized the group of traffickers in the back of the bus waving their guns around shouting for the cobrador to hand over the money. As people began yelling in the back, I joined the collective effort to run off the front of the bus, women with babies in-hand, elderly hobbling, me using my elementary school fire-drill skills. That time I got lucky. I stumbled awkwardly off the bus to see João Miguel, who I knew from local meetings, on the sidewalk talking with his neighbors.“E aí rapaz, foi assaltado?” asking if I had been robbed as he chuckled at the scared look on my face, I guess I had not normalized it all yet. I joined João on the side of the street, he offered some linguiça

114

from a small grill as he began talking about his political life in GBJ, the point of our meeting that day.

João was born in GBJ, his grandparents are from the interior of Ceará. He voted for the first time when he was sixteen years old, Brazil’s earliest legal voting age.35 Now at age thirty- seven, he works for a prominent vereador in GBJ as an assessor, a type of advisor, working closely with constituents throughout GBJ. Five years ago, the vereador gave him two apartments in a conjunto. He occupies one with his wife and kids, and his sister lives in the other. His livelihood depends on cargos comissionados,36 public positions obtained through a relationship with a politician. João became an assessor after working for years in GBJ as a cabo eleitoral and in numerous administrative positions at the regional municipal office -SER V. João says the cabo eleitoral is generally viewed negatively by residents, because vote buying is illegal and maintains the political status quo. For João, it was a way to make extra cash and to build a more extensive political network in his neighborhood.

João also represents his community in local CEPS meetings. He said, “the CEPs promotes a rights-based discourse.” The idea that politics should be based on equality led him to run for state congress (deputado estadual) in 2014. João said, “I did not expect to win, but it was a way to exercise my rights, to prove that I can be equal in an official political process.”

However, because he ran for office without the permission of the vereador who employs him, he and his wife lost their jobs with the city. This is when João says he realized, “I am a hostage to

35 Voting is obligatory from age 18 to 70 and optional for illiterates, and for those aged 16, 17, and above 70 years of age. See: Article 14 of the Brazilian Constitution and Article 7 of the Electoral Code. 36 Also, known as, “cargos de confiança”, are positions obtained through a relationship with an elected government official and generally last the duration of the politician’s time in office. This contrasts with cargos concursados which require passing a public service exam and a selection process evaluating each candidate’s qualifications.

115

party politics (refém da politica partidária), I have to do what the vereador wants, my livelihood depends on it.” To get his job back, João had to (re)prove his loyalty to the party:

After I lost the election for state congress, I had to support the opposing political

party to get my two jobs back. I helped a group of Camilo [current governor of

Ceará] supporters to get votes from GBJ for Camilo. I got to the point where I had

to lie, I lost the election, I lost my job, salary, it got to a point where I had to go to

Camilo’s side. I supported Camilo in the second round, saying Camilo would be

one of the best governors of our state [Ceará]. I said he would continue the work

of Cid Gomes [Governor of Ceará 2007-2015]. I mean I came to a point where I

was lying you know, saying things I didn’t believe to get votes. I felt like I was

betraying the people. Without employment, a job, for a father of a family with

two kids you must eventually lie a little, that’s how politics works. (João Miguel,

Personal Communication, 2015)

Once hostage, João sees guichet politics as the only viable way to help his community, that is, participating in CEPS and other participatory programs to obtain resources and services.

He said, “maybe participating as equals is a luxury.” While CEPS promotes rights-based ideologies, i.e., one can freely run for office without the threat of job loss, in practice, the reality is different. He said it’s not all bad, “for someone with little education like me, working for a vereador provides a stable salary of around R$2,000 to R$3,000 per month.” João invited me to accompany him the following day to observe his work as an assessor in the neighborhood.

We set out in an old two door Fiat, and spent several hours driving residents to appointments at health clinics, to community meetings, and to government offices, such as

CRAS (Centro de Referência de Assistência Social), to apply for social assistance programs.

116

Inside the CRAS, it was clear why residents preferred to be assisted by João, in most cases they skipped the lines of people waiting, and were seen immediately. One woman said, “I know it’s not right, but if I don’t go with João to CRAS or, even worse, to the clinic (posto de saúde), I will stand in line all day and never be seen, or worse, some people die waiting!” The CRAS are an entry point to access social assistance programs, a way of meeting requirements of the 1993

Social Assistance Law (Lei Orgânica da Assistência Social or LOAS)37 to provide social services and other basic needs guaranteed under the Brazilian Constitution. Clearly, one’s access is improved through political affiliation, but do the benefactors return a vote in kind? I asked several of our passengers if they voted for João’s vereador, results were mixed, some did, but most did not. One man said, “look I did not even vote for João when he ran for office, my whole family was bought out (comprada) by another vereador offering money, we all got R$50 each.”

Nevertheless, the relationship with João continues, João understands that, in extreme poverty, residents opt for resources whenever they come available. He tries to connect residents to as many resources as possible. In this way, João’s account demonstrates the fact that the patron- client relationship is less fixed than in rural Ceará. The vereador can take away jobs, i.e., cargos comissionados, however, since there are multiple vereadores, participatory programs, and NGOs, doing similar work in GBJ, João can more easily find another job. When João changes from one network to another, he said, “the only thing that changes is the vereador, the politician, the needs of the residents are the same, we just find another solution, through other contacts.” This fact equalizes the relationship between people like João and the vereador, for example.

37 Law n. 8.742, 7 of December 1993.

117

The Community Leader

Most leaders in GBJ are women. Some leaders, were involved in the Comunidades

Eclesiásticas de Base (CEB, Basic Ecclesiastic Communities) during the 1970s and 1980s in

Fortaleza and remained in leadership roles ever since. The CEBs were backed by the Catholic

Church and through liberation theology were one of the few forms of social mobilization during military rule. They were tolerated by the regime as “self-help” groups related to survival rather than political issues (Montambeault, 2016b:139). Many CEBs members became involved with leftist social movements during the transition to democracy. As the most knowledgeable in grassroots organizing, CEBs leaders were often at the forefront of negotiations with public officials for public resources. Many of GBJ’s leaders were either prior members of CEBs or adopt a similar ideology of liberating the oppressed and promoting increased conscientização

(consciousness raising) among the disenfranchised. However, some leaders have strayed from this approach and adopt a politicized leadership role that benefits individual rather than collective interests.

While some scholars have shown favela leaders to be members of criminal organizations

(see: Arias, 2006, Penglase, 2009) others have shown them to act as brokers between civil- society and the state (see: Koster, 2012). GBJ’s leaders adopt the role of the former, many hold positions in local organizations, such as the neighborhood association, or other NGOs. Clientelist brokers traditionally provide “targeted benefits and solve problems for followers,” often in expectation of political support for the patron (Stokes et al. 2013: 75). This has changed as the patron is less “fixed” (i.e., does not dominate a territory by force) in GBJ. In the onset of participatory programs, leaders provide targeted benefits, but usually by negotiating within participatory programs and with traditional patrons such as, the vereador, simultaneously. These

118

positions, and a leader’s ability to bring resources to his/her community, are part of maintaining their status and reputation as leader. Different from an assessor who covers the constituent base of a vereador, the leader works within their own community and at times, a few nearby as well.

Dona Luisa

One particularly muggy day in the SER V office I observed as Dona Luisa closed a deal or package (fechar um pacote) with one of the regional officials working with CEPS. I had built significant rapport with the official and Dona Luisa over the past year and thus, they agreed to let me sit in on one of their negotiations. Fechando pacotes with leaders is usually an aspect of clientelist deal making in GBJ that is sometimes used within participatory programs. In these moments, a leader’s intimate knowledge of residents’ needs is used as leverage to negotiate the resources exchanged for votes and other forms of political support. The official needed 500 votes for a vereador in the next election. The negotiation determines what the CEPs official registers as the protocoled community issue in the city database. To organize 500 votes, Dona Luisa requested the completion of the community crèche (daycare), a renovated school, and a guarantee that she would receive sufficient resources to pay supporters to campaign. The official accepted and closed the deal with a handshake and the two began a cordial chat, joking, and drinking coffee. I asked why not negotiate with the vereador directly? Dona Luisa said that

“prior to participatory programs such as OP, or CEPS, she would have, but with these programs, leaders and their input, are more valued (somos mais valorizados).” This means she has better access to the SER V and her terms can be officially registered as community needs as a part of a participatory program rather than through behind-the-scenes negotiating with a vereador.

Package deals are an example of guichet politics, a leader participates in CEPS simply to register demands, to obtain resources. But what about the 500 votes? She said, “we do our best to support

119

the party helping us, so if most of my community supports their party, the deal is complete. To achieve a successful negotiation for resources, the community’s needs must be accurate, this requires spending significant time conversing with residents. Dona Luisa invited me to join her the next day in her neighborhood.

It was an early morning, just after the rush of locals cramming onto public transit buses for the two-hour ride to Aldeota and other littoral neighborhoods to work as empregadas, zeladores, vigias, among other jobs.38 I was standing next to an old public phone (orelhão) staring at a gate across the street riddled with bullet holes. Dona Luisa began to explain that traffickers had attempted to assassinate her neighbor earlier that morning and she had to help mediate between the police and the family. Seemingly un-phased by the event, she invited me inside for one of Brazil’s (in)famously sugary coffees and began explaining her role as a community leader. She arrived in GBJ in the 1960s, before there was much infrastructure like plumbing or electricity. She had been active in the CEBs, where she learned the importance of community organizing to pressure the state and demand citzen-rights. However, she said the

CEBs did not prepare her to negotiate within participatory government programs, to dialogue directly with politicians.

After coffee, I accompanied Dona Luisa to a conjunto to meet with residents. She said it was important to sit with people and listen to their stories, their needs, and desires for change, even if they are used to negotiate later. The first apartment we visited in the conjunto belonged to

Dona Clara, a lifelong resident of GBJ. She had received the apartment through Minha Casa

38 Maids, groundskeepers or caretakers, and security guards.

120

Minha Vida (MCMV),39 a simple structure, with unfinished cinder-block walls, wooden flap shutters, and a large crucifix hanging from the wall. MCMV provides important low cost (some free) housing options for residents, but as Dona Clara explained, her vereador put her name at the top of the list at the SER V and got her the apartment. Like João’s case (above) showed, access to social assistance is usually improved with political affiliation. Dona Clara said, “I was desperate for food, for everything, I didn’t even care that the government left the conjunto without windows and doors!” Dona Clara provided Dona Luisa with a plastic chair and a glass of water, a sign of traditional hospitality. A discussion about life ensued, Dona Clara listed the difficulties of the conjunto stating, “we are forgotten, we don’t even appear on the city map, we are just here fending for ourselves, in God’s hands.” Dona Clara’s hands brushed against the black marks on the living room walls, as she described the flooding that occurs during the rainy season (January to June), due to a lack of drainage infrastructure. Mucky flood waters had filled the room and left stains on the concrete, but fortunately, she said with a slight chuckle, “the water did not reach the hammock,” demonstrating the height of the hammock she slept in at night. Dona Luisa agreed to take these “demands” to the vereador, but “he will require our support,” informing Dona Clara to organize her neighbors to meet with the vereador later that month to discuss terms. Dona Luisa later told me she would present these issues in various meetings at the SER V, NGOs, and other participatory programs. She said, “this puts more pressure to produce results, because the problem is visible to more people and if the vereador does nothing he loses support.” The leader engages a traditional clientelist channel of support

39 The program My House, My Life, was launched on 07/07/2009 with the Federal Law N. 11.977 with the intent of providing affordable housing options for low-income families. The program serves three income brackets, most residents of GBJ qualify under the first, consisting of families who earn up to R$1,600 per month, living in a high- risk area or homeless, with handicap family members, and with women as head of household. Cities may also have additional criteria for selection in addition to the national criteria.

121

(the vereador), but also distributes the knowledge of needs to other channels (participatory programs). The fact that leaders can rely on the support of participatory programs leaves the vereador vulnerable. Dona Luisa said the weakness of the vereador is that he/she does not generally have close relations with local people, they focus on the leaders:

The more leaders he [vereador] gets, the better for him. The politician creates a

package with the leader, package X. Suppose the election is in October, he closes

the deal for August, September, and October, 3 months, a package of R$2,000,

sometimes more. Then that leader will work the local people that he/she knows in

her area. The politician will setup a meeting, they have a file that has everything,

the name of the resident, zone, session, you understand, the voter registration

everything. Generally, a person that is a leader will not obtain less than 100 votes,

so giving R$2000 ($616 USD) is profitable because he will get at least 100 votes

from a single person. The leader has control of local support. (Dona Luisa,

personal communication, 2015).

Dona Luisa admitted, some leaders exploit this and attempt to make money for themselves without caring for the community. However, her point is that with increased options for communal support, especially those found in participatory programs, closing deals with a vereador is only one option among many. This, in addition to the ability to influence local support for a politician, grants the leader significant leverage.

Leaders and vereadores typically invite individuals like Dona Clara to participate in the local neighborhood association (associação de moradores) or NGO sponsored programs and in exchange, provide a minimum salary and perhaps offer their kids access to professional courses.

Some include NGOs backed by vereadores, such as, the Sociedade Beneficente Sara Rosita in

122

Bom Jardim.40 Most residents interviewed view such forms of employment as inherently contractual, part of a dyadic relationship with the leader, but others view these actions as part of friendship, or good will (boa vontade) of the liderança or vereador. There are many NGOs in

GBJ, for example, the Rede DELIS,41 is a federation style network comprised of thirty-five organizations operating in GBJ. The Rede DELIS generally adopts a left-leaning political ideology and maintains a critical stance towards the state and formal government participation.

Many leaders are involved in both the Rede DELIS and formal participatory programs.

Clearly, many residents naturally rely upon the local leader to solve problems. The leader is, as Javier Auyero (2001:174) shows of Argentine brokers, a “local center of power” supported by an inner circle of followers who believe broker mediation is a normal (non-arbitrary) form of engaging the government. In addition to their inner circle support, a leader’s knowledge of resident’s vulnerabilities, political preferences, and livelihood situations, and is valuable when exchanged for desired political outcomes. In traditional clientelism, managing voters through

“proximity,” to “monitor their actions,” is crucial to “enforcing the implicit redistributive contract” of clientelism (Stokes, 2005:324). However, in GBJ, participatory programs diversify resource access. Since the vereador is not the only option. The implicit “redistributive contract,” between the patron and voters, is not always followed, as João’s case above shows.

As brokers, the leaders create a livelihood within a space of extreme poverty, but with limited public resources they are not able to distribute their clientelist earnings or negotiate city investments to benefit all residents and thus, create ways of categorically excluding other residents. The issues with the greatest leveraging potential are used to negotiate with the public

40 The NGO Sara Rosita (Sociedade Beneficente Sara Rosita) is located on the street Oscar França and backed by the vereador José do Carmo. 41 Rede de Desenvolvimento Local e Integral Sustentável do Grande Bom Jardim.

123

sector. When certain community issues are not presented by a leader, this can be interpreted as self-interested behavior.

To provide more immediate results to residents, the vereadores use information on voter needs to provide services through an association in the community or directly through the leader, who may also have an association. The association serves an important institutional function.

When officially registered as an NGO, an association can open bank accounts and is eligible for certain public funding, making resource acquisition and transfer easier. Some residents readily point out that leaders of local NGOs and community associations in GBJ are just puppets of politicians (“são laranjas”), providing non-formal access to public resources. Thus, not all leaders are viewed positively.

The Social Militants - Quero o Povo no Poder!

The social militant would not openly describe him/herself as part of a vereador network.

However, they promote participation as an expression of equality and speak out against clientelist tendencies. Thus, they provide an important role in the “balancing act” between public officials and GBJ residents. Janaína, a 35-year-old social militant in GBJ, says that most militants follow the Workers’ Party’s (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) calls for “radical democracy,” based on popular participation in politics, and collective decision making. She said,

“being militant has a lot to do with autonomy. This means that, “we do not become compromised by an obligation to vote for a politician so that we can denounce violations of our rights.”

Autonomy is preserved through political consciousness, to defend a cause rather than a politician. Many social militants maintain this ideological stance through constant mobilization, and constantly pressuring the state:

124

We organize rights-based claims per the needs of GBJ and constantly pressure the

corresponding government office. We constantly put pressure on public officials.

For example, since 2007, many youth have died from gang/police violence in the

periphery, and we called the Secretary of Security of Fortaleza to explain their

policy to solve the killing of our youth [extermínio da juventude]. We do the same

with housing issues, demand an explanation of housing policy. The point is to

unite residents and the public sector, but in autonomous form. (Janaína, Personal

Communication, 2015)

Many social militants maintain their autonomy by voting null [nulo] in elections. Davi, a twenty- two-year-old militant says assistentialist (assistentialistas) tendencies are the reason he votes null:

Politicians benefit from the needs of the poor and cause resource dependence. We

try to link people to non-assistentialist forms of support. Assistentialist politics

have turned out the poor’s votes because they are in need, but these votes

guarantee a situation [livelihood], rather ensure the state fulfills its obligations.

Many people continue with this form of politics, but many have also started

voting null [nulo] because they are tired of the same politics in Brazil. (Davi,

Personal Communication, 2015).

Neither blank (em branco) or null votes, are counted towards a political candidate or party. In

GBJ, there is a conceptual difference between the two, a blank vote generally means that the voter does not express any preference for a candidate, a sign of indifference. However, a null vote, is usually as a sign of protest. Per the Superior Electoral Court in Brazil (Tribunal Superior

125

Eleitoral or TSE),42 the number of electors who either voted blank, null, or abstained entirely, reached 406,147 or 23.99% of the electorate (n=1,692,657), in the 2016 election for Fortaleza’s mayor. This is a 12.4% increase from the 361,211 null, blank votes, and abstentions in the 2012 municipal election. Of the total registered votes in the 2016 municipal election, 5.86% or 82,342 votes were null, a 1.17% increase from 2012.43 These findings suggest that the electorate is increasingly expressive of its discontent for municipal politics and could also imply increasing freedom to vote as one chooses rather than as part of a clientelist deal. Within participatory programs, social militants readily speak out against leaders and officials viewed as clientelist, leading to friction, but also to demands for rights rather than services or infrastructure.

The Voters

Voting takes place at urnas (ballot boxes) generally at a public school in the neighborhood. Some voters avoid politics altogether, but others fear the loss of resources if they do not vote or support political leaders. Heloísa, a local university student summarizes this point,

“the cabo eleitoral gets people’s name and voter registration number for the politicians, the vote is secret, but they know exactly where you will vote.” She said a lot of people give their information because they are intimidated and do not want to risk their social benefits:

People [residents of GBJ] think they are prisoners to this, you know? For

example, a person relies on a certain social program, if someone comes and says

that politician X put in that program and if he isn’t elected the program will end,

this person is obligated to vote for politician X because he/she needs the program.

The politician always has a line connecting people to know what the deficiencies

42 See: http://www.tse.jus.br/ 43 See: http://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/cadernos/politica/online/nulos-brancos-e-abstencoes-crescem- entre-eleitores-de-fortaleza-1.1627516

126

of the place are for him to highlight that deficiency in his discourse. (Heloísa,

Personal Communication, 2015)

Building on this point, Maria, part of an NGO in GBJ that seeks to build political consciousness among residents stated:

People have this difficulty of understanding what politics is. So, due to the

absence of this, people have difficulty believing in their power to say, “I don’t

want to be involved with this [clientelism].” In school, there aren’t classes on

public policy, there are no classes on voter’s rights, there isn’t even a class about

this situation [local politics], so people don’t know. They don’t know how to vote,

or why to vote, for which candidate, what the structure of right or left is. People

don’t understand that the power [força] of the state is bigger than mine, but I am

the one that maintains the state in power even with so much poverty [miséria].

(Maria, Personal Communication, 2015)

Gilson

Many residents learn ‘what politics is,’ through experience. Gilson, a middle-aged father, has lived his entire life in GBJ and worked for several years in a cargo comissionado in the prefeitura. In contrast to João, above, Gilson rejects guichet politics and decided to break his political ties. Reflecting on his previous job he states:

I was the boss of a guy that had 23 years on the job. The vereador put me there, so

you can see how the public service is weak. You take the opportunity of a person

that studied, that got a degree, that could be in that position, right? So the

politician benefits from this position and uses it, and the people [o povo] are the

ones who lose with this. (Gilson, Personal Communication, 2015)

127

Did you continue with the job despite how you felt?

I left, I got an opportunity to do electrician courses. I could walk with my own

two feet, just like I wish that other people that are intertwined by them

[politicians] you know, they are being imprisoned by them. I would like for those

people to also walk on their own feet and abandon the politicians. Leave them.

(Gilson, Personal Communication, 2015)

Interestingly, Gilson rejected his clientelist position outright, saying repeatedly that he refused to humiliate himself in a job he was unqualified for, just so certain politicians could benefit. He lost a decent income, he said the position paid R$1,500 ($467 USD) per month, but he was obligated to give R$500 ($155 USD) to the local leader leaving him with R$1,000. Since rejecting his political ties he works part-time as an electrician and has supported a service-fair (feira de serviços) in his community. Service fairs operate at the street level, participants usually share close relationships (friends, neighbors, family). Participants exchange skillsets such as electric work, in Gilson’s case, for other needed items (i.e., haircuts, diet advice, carpentry, childcare).

Gilson said that if he cannot participate as an equal within the government, he prefers to create spaces of equality among his neighbors and share the few resources they have.

Conclusion

It is clear, no matter one’s position in the political network, the paradox of participation is constantly present. João understands that participation as equals is not possible in his case, and uses guichet politics to benefit his community. Dona Luisa diversifies her points of negotiation from traditional patrons to CEPS officials. Janaína and Davi put constant pressure on the state while promoting autonomous political engagement and Gilson auto-excludes himself by forging his own communal based forms of resource distribution independent of formal politics. GBJ’s

128

case shows that existing informal clientelist networks complicate collective and autonomous forms of participation. Most forms of civil-state engagement involve traditional actors such as the leader or the assessor, rather than the common resident. The fact that collective organizing is not strong under current participatory initiatives in Fortaleza and guichet politics is more common, incites worry in the face of Brazil’s current political crisis brought on by the corruption probe Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato) that resulted in the impeachment of its leftist president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 for alleged manipulation of the federal budget, and new legislation by right-wing President Michel Temer’s administration that will undoubtedly be felt heavily by Brazil’s poor. For example, the neo-liberal constitutional amendment PEC 55, passed by the Brazilian Senate in December 2016, freezes social spending for twenty years, a plan the

UN Special Rapporteur has stated will “hit the poorest and most vulnerable Brazilians the hardest” and clearly violates Brazil’s international rights obligations.44

As the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ clash in places like GBJ, residents continue to make sense of and act within the local effects of a national project of democratization, symbolizing the local adaptation of Western ideals of modernization, on the one hand, while mitigating the culturally embedded practices of local politics on the other. In this article, I explored how new mechanisms of participatory governance have impacted traditional political networks organized to access resources and to demand the fulfillment of citizen rights. Through a look at the history of clientelism’s urban evolution in Fortaleza, and ethnographic depictions of key informal political roles, I uncovered diverse decision making processes leading to varied forms of participation in politics in GBJ, a context of extreme poverty in which clientelism has long served the traditional role of resource distribution to residents.

44 See: United Nations Office of the High Commissioner, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21006

129

I relied on two paradoxes of participation, the “paradox of equality” and the “paradox of guichet politics” to analyze the varied logics behind GBJ residents’ decisions to participate in politics. This allowed for a clearer picture of residents who opt for guichet politics, a way of working the system for resources, and those who object to participation since equality is yet to be guaranteed by participatory processes. In the case of the assessor, proximity to the vereador implies a compromise, loyalty in exchange for a stable income. Yet, the assessor uses his proximity to the vereador to provide better access to resources for community members. The leader, holding a culturally significant position of power, diversifies points of negotiation with the state, ranging from traditional ties with a patron to new processes of city planning, such as, the CEPS. The social militants, focus energy on maintaining personal autonomy, and see debt to politicians as an impediment to their progress. They vote null, and constantly pressure the state, curbing authoritarian tendencies that may arise. Finally, the voters possess varied knowledge of the political machine, some vote out of fear of losing social benefits, while others, reject political affiliation and promote equality through local resource exchanges such as, service fairs.

In contrast to the fixed nature of patron-client relationships in rural Ceará, GBJ demonstrates more fluid and diverse political networks with strong internal ties, but varied ideological approaches to confronting the state. An issue of current policy approaches is that guichet politics is incentivized over sustained civic mobilization based on an ideology of citizen rights and equality. A highly vulnerable population tends to prioritize resource access before political ideological achievements. This study has implications for our understanding of participatory governance initiatives in poor urban communities. It calls into question the tendency of participatory programs to provide increased coping mechanisms to the urban poor rather than access to constitutional rights. Political networks have clearly adapted to maximize

130

access to resources provided by participatory programs. Vereadores have additionally adapted by creating their own associations, or points of resource access in local communities. Anthropology offers significant insight into the workings of urban social and political networks. The impacts of

Brazil’s current political crisis on the urban poor will undoubtedly tend towards the negative.

The end of thirteen years of leftist Workers’ Party rule will certainly lead to a rollback of important social policies that aid the urban poor in Brazil. Political networks like the one documented here, will become an increasingly important means by which the urban poor mitigate economic insecurity and structural marginalization. Civic mobilization as an adaptive measure to acquire resources allows the urban poor to cope with marginalization, but does little to ameliorate social realities based on inequality.

131

References

Abers, R. (1998). From clientelism to cooperation: Local government, participatory policy, and civic organizing in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Politics & Society, 26(4), 511-537. doi:10.1177/0032329298026004004

Ansell, A. (2015). Democracy as the negation of discourse: Liberalism, clientelism, and agency in Brazil. American Ethnologist, 42(4), 688-702. doi:10.1111/amet.12164

-- (2014). Zero hunger: Political culture and antipoverty policy in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: University of North Carolina Press.

Arias, E. D. (2006). Drugs & democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, social networks, & public security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

--(2006b). Trouble en route: Drug trafficking and clientelism in Rio de Janeiro shantytowns. Qualitative Sociology, 29(4), 427-445. doi:10.1007/s11133-006-9033-x

Auyero, J. (2001). Poor people's politics: Peronist survival networks and the legacy of Evita. Durham [N.C.]; London: Duke University Press.

Avritzer, L. (2002). Democracy and the public space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

-- (2009). Participatory institutions in democratic Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Baiocchi, G. (2001). Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment and deliberative democratic theory. Politics & Society, 29(1), 43-72. doi:10.1177/0032329201029001003

Caldeira, T., & Holston, J. (2015). Participatory urban planning in brazil. Urban Studies, 52(11), 2001-2017. doi:10.1177/0042098014524461

Filho, G. A. (1994). Clientelism and politics in Brazil. revisiting old problems. Novos Estudos CEBRAP, (38), 225-240.

Flynn, P. (1974). Class, clientelism, and coercion: Some mechanisms of internal dependency and control. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 12(2), 133-156. doi:10.1080/14662047408447207

Garmany, J. (2011). Situating Fortaleza: Urban space and uneven development in Northeastern Brazil. Cities, 28(1), 45-52. doi:10.1016/j.cities.2010.08.004

132

Gaventa, J., & Cornwall, A. (2006). Challenging the boundaries of the possible: Participation, knowledge and power. IDS Bulletin, 37(6), 122–128.

--(1994). Popular organization and democracy in Rio de Janeiro: A tale of two favelas. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hickey, S., & Mohan, G. (2004). Participation: From tyranny to transformation?: Exploring new approaches to participation in development. New York; London: Zed books.

IBGE. (2010-2014). “Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística.” (http://www.ibge.gov.br).

IPLANFOR. (2015). Plano de Mobilidade de Fortaleza “PlanMob” (pp. 4-114, Tech.). Fortaleza, Brazil: Instituto de Planejamento de Fortaleza.

Kaufman, R. R. (1974). The patron-client concept and macro-politics: Prospects and problems. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(3), 284-308. doi:10.1017/S0010417500012457

Kobayashi, M. (2006). Political Clientelism and Corruption: Neo-structuralism and Republicanism. In J. Kawata (Ed.), Comparing Political Corruption and Clientelism (pp. 1-22). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.

Koster, M. (2012). Mediating and getting ‘burnt’ in the gap: Politics and brokerage in a Recife slum, Brazil. Critique of Anthropology, 32(4), 479-497. doi:10.1177/0308275X12456643

Leal, V. N. (1977). Coronelismo: The municipality and representative government in Brazil. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mohan, G., & Stokke, K. (2000). Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism. Third World Quarterly, 21(2), 247–268.

Montambeault, F. (2016). Participatory citizenship in the making? the multiple citizenship trajectories of participatory budgeting participants in Brazil. Journal of Civil Society, 12(3), 282- 298. doi:10.1080/17448689.2016.1213508

-- (2016b). The politics of local participatory democracy in Latin America: Institutions, actors, and interactions. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

133

Montero, A. (2010). No Country for Leftists? Clientelist Continuity and the 2006 Vote in the Brazilian Northeast. Journal of Politics in Latin America, 2(2), 113-153.

Nichter, S. (2014). Conceptualizing vote buying. Electoral Studies, 35, 315-327. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2014.02.008

Penglase, B. (2009). States of insecurity: everyday emergencies, public secrets, and drug trafficker power in a Brazilian favela. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 32(1): 47–63.

Stokes, S. C. (2005). Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina. The American Political Science Review, 99(3), 315–325.

Stokes, S. C., Dunning, T., Nazareno, M., Brusco, V. (2013). Brokers, voters, and clientelism: The puzzle of distributive politics. New York, N.Y: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107324909

Wampler, B. (2007). Participatory budgeting in Brazil: Contestation, cooperation, and accountability. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press.

-- (2008). When does participatory democracy deepen the quality of democracy? lessons from Brazil. Comparative Politics, 41(1), 4.

134

APPENDIX C

Countering Clientelism in Northeastern Brazil: Núcleos de aproximação and feiras de serviços as viable alternatives.

Abstract

In Fortaleza, Brazil, narratives of democracy and equality have begun to challenge traditional forms of political participation based on clientelist relationships which perpetuate cycles of inequality. As residents of Grande Bom Jardim, one of the city’s poorest periphery zones, incorporate democratic politics into civic organizing, new forms of political participation and organization have emerged. This paper explores these novel participatory political modes, showing that they expose an ideological shift from beliefs which have historically normalized clientelist bonds of inequality and dependence to forms of communal organization based on equal and non-hierarchical access to diverse sets of resources. Two principal alternatives to clientelism, núcleos de aproximação (leadership clusters) and feiras de serviços (service fairs) are analyzed to formulate the argument that despite endemic resource scarcity, the urban poor recuse themselves from clientelism (a source of resources) and actively seek its modification by incorporating national narratives of democracy into culturally relevant forms of action to create what some scholars have referred to as alternative governmentalities. The analysis provides insight into how Brazil’s urban poor claim space and voice despite a political system based on inherent inequalities.

Keywords: Brazil, participation, co-governance, favelas, clientelism, empowerment, urban poverty. Participation, however, has one meaning when it is seen from the standpoint of those who govern, i.e., as a category of governance. It will have a very different meaning when seen from the position of the governed, i.e., as a practice of democracy. (Chatterjee, 2004:69).

Politics is performed by the people not distributed to them (May, 2010:21).

Politics does not happen because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics causes the poor to exist as an entity. (Rancière, 1999:11).

Introduction

Favela or shantytown residents in Brazil have been commonly understood to live under conditions that afford little opportunity for political agency. Brazil’s urban realities of poverty, drug trafficking, and clientelist political networks often further restrict democratic participation in formal political processes. The ideas of liberal democracy, implemented since Brazil’s military dictatorship ended (1985-present), have not been equally liberating to all (see

135

Appadurai, 2013). Six percent of Brazil’s population or 11.4 million people, live in favelas, referred to as “subnormal agglomerates” (see paper 1) in the national census (IBGE, 2010). In the city of Fortaleza, the capital of the Northeastern state of Ceará, clientelism or patronage, i.e., trading votes for favors, has existed historically, virtually unchallenged, as the model by which public goods and services are generally distributed regardless of social class and at various levels of government (Hagopian, 1990). Resource access based on personal relationships rather than citizen rights, ensures the persistence of inequality in Fortaleza, where eighteen percent of its 2.5 million inhabitants live in subnormal agglomerates (IBGE, 2010). A study conducted by

Fortaleza’s Municipal Secretariat of Economic Development (SDE) revealed that seventy-two of

Fortaleza’s 119 neighborhoods have a human development index below 0.5, implying low income, low life expectancy, and low access to education for just over 1.6 million of the city’s

2.5 million inhabitants.45 Participatory governance and planning initiatives proposed by the municipal government of Fortaleza (i.e., popular councils, assemblies, and participatory budgeting), provide a formal public process of ameliorating widespread poverty and inequality by incorporating civil society into public processes of planning. Nonetheless, a strong distrust of government among the city’s poor, bred from a chronic lack of public sector support in poor communities and a legacy of authoritarianism, has pushed many of the city’s poor towards informal modes of social organizing and political action.

In this paper, I document two informal grassroots participatory organizations in

Fortaleza’s poor neighborhoods to address the following question: What role do informal,

45 Measured 0 to 1, 0= lowest, 1=highest. This study was conducted in 2015 by the Municipal Secretariat of Economic Development in Fortaleza (SDE). The study relied on 2010 census data to calculate a human development index (HDI) by neighborhood that considers income, education, and health/longevity in the methodology. Due to adaptations in methodology (i.e., reliance on different databases) to create the neighborhood-level index, it should not be directly compared to HDI national or HDI municipal data.

136

grassroots participatory organizations play in shaping local conceptions of politics and civic engagement? This relates to a broader question, to wit; how do informal modes of participation, based on democratic ideologies, impact traditional political cultures such as, clientelism? I argue that informal participatory modes redefine politics by exposing traditional political forms based on clientelism as arbitrary rather than a ‘misrecognized’ or normalized phenomenon through the creation of “competing possibles” (Bourdieu, 1977:169). This means that informal organizing can create the solidarity and social capital needed to allow residents the option to refuse clientelist relationships that could otherwise provide needed resources. Alternatives expose clientelism as arbitrary, an option among many, rather than the norm. In this way, communal solidarity and equality take precedent over resource acquisition, and provoke the possibility for

‘the political’ to be redefined as a sphere of equality rather than inherent inequality (i.e., via dyadic clientelist exchanges). Thus, participation, outside of state-sponsored participatory programs, creates an avenue for residents to reassert themselves as subjects with rights rather than marginalized periphery residents. In so doing, informal civic organizing contributes to a

“governmentality from below” (Appadurai, 2013), in which the urban poor assert how they wish to be governed. By denouncing clientelism and rejecting their status as marginal citizens, residents create a site at which the contradictions of Brazil’s democracy become visible. Informal versions of participatory initiatives are a means by which residents preserve their notions of just politics,46 and define ‘the political’ in a way that supports their aspirations for the future.

Promoting ‘just politics’ involves action that builds a democracy concerned with people who are not in power, rather than reinforcing the world of those who are (May, 2010).

46 See Savell (2015) for similar findings in the favela Maré of Rio de Janeiro.

137

Here I use the concept of the ‘politics of equals’ (Rancière, 1999), a heuristic suggested by Baiocchi & Conner (2013), to analyze alternative conceptions of the political. In this view,

‘political activity’ must expose fundamental questions of equality. As such, ‘the political’ consists of acts that “challenge dominant relationships by presenting the possibility of their undoing” (Baiocchi and Conner, 2013:90). Applying the ‘politics of equals’ as a conceptual framework exposes the potential political nature of informal modes of participation that occur outside of the traditional ‘political sphere.’ By documenting the emergence of informal modes of civic participation, this research exposes the interplay of networks based on political ideologies of equality and democratic politics and those of “disjunctured” democratic settings (Caldeira &

Holston, 1999). Disjunctured democracies exist in nations that have transitioned from a military regime to a democratic government, but have not sufficiently reformed the nation’s institutions and do not guarantee democratic rights to all citizens. In Brazil, this is evidenced by its limited form of democracy, that consolidates political rights for free, fair, elections, but excludes other rights such as equal access to justice or freedom from abuses of power by the state (Caldeira and

Holston, 1999; O’Donnell, 1993; Diamond, 1995). A look at informal participatory modes exposes how the urban poor create political action from below to account for these disjunctions.

I focus on two informal organizations operating in the five neighborhoods comprising

Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ); Núcleos de Aproximação (leadership clusters or NUAPs) and informal groups of mutual support, known as feiras de serviços (service fairs). Located on the southwestern periphery of Fortaleza, GBJ’s neighborhoods, which account for 10% of the city’s population, consistently rank among Fortaleza’s poorest communities. Most residents interviewed during a year of fieldwork (October 2014 to October 2015) describe local politics as

“feudalist,” citing difficulties in articulating communal needs to government officials, leaving

138

them to rely on a system of individualized, brokered, access to public goods and services. By analyzing these groups, I intend to contribute to the broader anthropological understanding of how participation and informal civic organizing produce alternative conceptions of ‘politics’ in poor neighborhoods in urban Brazil. Understanding government sponsored participatory mechanisms used to improve civil society’s engagement with the government is important, but increased research is needed to understand how the poor conceptualize and embody politics outside of the state (e.g., Chatterjee, 2004). I begin by briefly examining participatory governance as an ongoing project of reconfiguring the boundaries and notions surrounding ‘the political’ in post-dictatorial Brazil and, after a brief introduction to GBJ, I examine, ethnographically, the NUAPs and service fairs as sites in which governmental logic is interrupted by local definitions of politics and equality.

Participatory Governance and ‘the Political’

In participatory governance literature, there is an emerging interest in understanding the boundaries of the political, and subsequently the proper way to define the dynamics of the conflicts that often makeup the political sphere (Baiocchi & Conner, 2013). Baiocchi & Conner

(2013) point to an important difference in the way political philosophers and political sociologists, and I would add anthropologists, define the political. Political philosophy offers a less restrictive view by considering the political to be embedded within certain interactions as opposed to “social location” or “kinds of actors” (Baiocchi & Conner, 2013:90). This means that political action is not limited to traditional ‘political activity’ such as voting, campaigning, or occupying a political office or role, but as Jacques Rancière’s concept ‘the politics of equals,’ shows, includes all “acts that challenge dominant relationships by presenting the possibility of their undoing” (Baiocchi and Conner, 2013:90). For example, in GBJ, political rallies,

139

campaigns, and at times protests, occur at the behest of local vereadores (city councilman or woman) operating intricate clientelist networks. While such acts are commonly conceived as

‘political participation,’ they do little to challenge existing dominant relationships or the general social order of GBJ. In Jacques Rancière’s (1999) conception, an act is only political when it undoes (or improves) the perceptible divisions of a given social order (in his words “police order”) (30). If it does nothing to improve or undo the given social order, participation only serves to ‘police’ or reproduce an existing order. This heuristic allows one to identify when participatory modes become political by gauging their ability to challenge or improve upon a given social order. In this way, political agency within the informal sphere is more exposed to analysis.

Politics need not eradicate an existing order, but should improve upon it, by opening it to radical egalitarian demands (Bassett, 2014:897), politics should rearrange the logics of the given order to create new spaces for emerging voices. This requires that equality be a presupposition of social interaction. For example, clientelism is based on a presupposition of inequality, the patron and client are inherently unequal. Action resulting from this relationship perpetuates hierarchy and confirms the existing social order. Through hierarchy one is constantly reminded of his or her assigned role or ‘allotted place in which they are expected to remain’ (May, 2008:34).

Presupposing equality in social interactions aids in undoing hierarchical relationships.

In sum, the politics of equals allows one to account for both the production of the actions and beliefs which lead to democratic politics. As most formal avenues of participation tend to solidify, rather than equalize hierarchies in GBJ, interviewees expressed a preference for participation based on self-governance, forms of “governmentality from below” or “counter- governmentality” (Appadurai, 2013:167). This is in reaction to how the modern state governs by

140

categorizing people as rights-bearing citizens or subjects who are constantly targets of government policy (Chatterjee, 2004). People who lack ‘full citizenship,’ such as, GBJ’s residents, are left to negotiate their rights in what Chatterjee (2004) calls “political society,” a space in which the contradictions of modern state governmentality are constantly visible and in tension with new forms of citizen engagement with the state. Through innovative political forms, periphery residents directly seek to modify their classification as marginal citizens and subjects with conditional rights. In this way, they refuse any form of “participation” that does not improve the existing social order. A focus on the political nature of interactions, allows one to identify social actions that remain outside the formal sphere of politics, but ultimately shape governance due to their political nature.

A Brief Overview of Participatory Approaches in Brazil

Post-military rule in Brazil is known for its innovative participatory institutions (Avritzer,

2009). Brazil’s 1988 constitution directly supports participatory approaches to healthcare, social assistance, the environment, and urban organization, leading to the emergence of 170 national participatory initiatives nationwide (Avritzer, 2009:2). Consequently, participatory institutions have become a part of routine politics in many Brazilian cities, but are frequently embedded within local networks of political power, a dynamic which often leads to various degrees of clientelist cooptation of formal participatory initiatives. The importance of urban Brazil as a sphere of democratic learning, creation, and contestation cannot be overstated. Brazil’s constitution assigns municípios47 or municipal governments, a key role in “delivering services and promoting development,” giving them a level of democratic responsibility and authority unparalleled in the developing world (Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva, 2011:7). Brazil’s cities, have

47 A município is similar to a county in the U.S.A., each has a sede or central administration located in the metropolitan area and a prefeito(a) or mayor at the head.

141

taken on one hundred million new residents since 1960 (Baiocchi et al. 2011) leading to a national population that, today, is 85% urban (IBGE, 2014). Such a reality offers a ripe environment for the study of the interstitial nature of democracy and traditional political systems.

Much has been written on participatory governance in Brazil, most of the literature focuses on formalized processes within government institutions (i.e., social location), such as the popular councils and assemblies mandated by the constitution (see Abers, 1998; Santos, 1998;

Avritzer, 2009; Speer, 2012; Piper, 2014; Wampler, 2014). Few studies have specifically analyzed informal modes of political participation or considered the social interactions of the urban poor used to define the terms of their own emancipation and political engagement. In other words, anthropology should focus more on the informal “social platforms” used by the urban poor to defend their political interests and mediate the uncertainty of political and economic inequality (viz., Vélez-lbáñez (1988) work on Mexican urban networks of exchange).

Contrasting political interactions in both formal and informal settings, may lead to a better consensus on participation as a concept. It is clear in Leonardo Avritzer’s (2009) survey of recent work on participation in Brazil, that the term participation often embraces dissimilar meanings, ranging from, “increasing citizen control over the state,” “exercising real power over decisions,” and the “commitments and capacities of ordinary people to make sensible decisions”

(3). In the context of clientelism in GBJ, patrons use invitations for local participation in associations, rallies, and projects, to recruit loyal supporters for their clientelist platform.

Participation in these fluctuating forms is hard to define, as it is embedded within demonstrations of compliance to providers of resources as well as within imaginaries of political liberty. A focus on informal participatory modes reveals the meanings the people (o povo) assign to participation and consequently relocates participation as a way of enacting ‘the political’ and performing

142

politics. In this way, the interactions that constitute participatory modes may be exposed as political, independent of their degree of formality or proximity to the public sector.

Popular participation in urban areas, specifically, is guaranteed by the City Statute of

2001, which requires Brazilian municipalities to create a master plan (Plano Diretor) for development with the direct involvement of local participants. Article 40 of the City Statute guarantees that the master plan and its implementation, overseen by the Legislative and

Executive municipal branches, must guarantee “the promotion of public assemblies and debates with the participation of the population and of representative associations of the various segments of the community” (my translation).48 Currently, participatory urban planning is a phenomenon “instituted in more than 1400 of the 1644 municipalities in which it is constitutionally required” (Caldeira & Holston, 2015:2002). Article 158 of Fortaleza’s Organic

Municipal Law (Lei Orgânica do Município de Fortaleza) describes the master plan as a “basic instrument of urban development policy (…) assuring ample community discussion, participation of representative entities of civil society, and those of political parties in its design”

(my translation). GBJ has been the target of many formal (governmental) participatory initiatives ranging from the participatory budgeting (orçamento participativo or OP) project under former

Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) mayor Luizianne Lins (2005-2012), to the current social participation (participação social), and Fortaleza 2040. The Special Coordinator for Social

Participation (Coordenadoria Especial de Participação Social or CEPS) is the extant version of the OP model created in 2005 by the Lins administration. There is a CEPS office within each of

Fortaleza’s seven regional executive secretariats or SERs. 49 CEPS divides Fortaleza into thirty- two “territories of citizenship” (territórios da cidadania), each with

48 § 4 of art.40 Law n. 10.257/2001, Estatuto da Cidade. 49 Secretaria Executiva Regional or SER. This study focuses on the SER V, the poorest of the SERs in Fortaleza.

143

• Create an understanding of the current state of the city of Phase 1 Fortaleza. Fortaleza Hoje.

• Come to a consensus on the desired state of the city of Fortaleza. Phase 2 Fortaleza Desejada

• Create a plan of action for the creation of the desired city. Planos Phase 3 e Ações

• Integration of the information from territorial, sectoral, and public Participatory Process sector groups.

Figure 8: Planning Phases of Fortaleza 2040. a varied number of local volunteers who serve as “citizen agents” (agentes de cidadania). The citizen agents are the government’s local point of contact, and generally participate in government sponsored assemblies, forums, and popular councils. Incorporating residents as citizen agents is a method of reducing the legacy of authoritarianism common in the Brazilian government’s interactions with the people during the dictatorship. Fortaleza 2040 builds on the

CEPS model to create a strategic development plan for Fortaleza with popular input. The methodology follows several phases seen in Figure 8; (1) Fortaleza Today (Fortaleza Hoje) – a discussion and documentation of current city issues, and possible solutions, (2) Desired Fortaleza

(Fortaleza Desejada) – documentation of the challenges and creation of objectives to achieve by the year 2040, and (3) Plan of Action (Planos e Ações) – creation of a defined directive and monitoring system to accomplish the defined objectives. Fortaleza 2040 includes participatory groups at all phases. There are representative groups from the public sector (núcleos do poder público), from different sectors, such as economy, environment, social services (NGO’s, among other associations) (núcleos setoriais), and from local level institutions such as CEPS, and others

(núcleos territoriais). As will be shown below, the NUAP is a grassroots núcleo, structured like the núcleos of Fortaleza 2040, but maintains its autonomy by operating outside the public sector.

144

Each of these initiatives put an increased emphasis on formal participation in GBJ.

However, residents generally view the current initiative, Fortaleza 2040, as a technical top-down approach, organized locally by existing community leaders, describing it as “more of the same.”50 Nonetheless, most residents have been fooled one to many times, as will be explained in more detail below, and thus, assume processes of formal participation are coopted by clientelist networks. Thus, residents of GBJ often prefer informal modes defined on their own terms, but organized around the ideals of official participatory initiatives. This trend points to significant conceptual revelations surrounding the ways in which the urban poor redefine “the political” through grassroots organizing and informal social platforms.

The Setting

My analysis is based on ethnographic data collected while I lived in the periphery of

Fortaleza from October 2014 to October 2015. Grande Bom Jardim, literally, “the good garden,” in English, consists of five neighborhoods (bairros),51 each with numerous communities

(comunidades). GBJ’s neighborhoods consistently rank among the city’s poorest, known infamously as areas of violence, gang related crime, and endemic poverty. GBJ’s population of approximately 240,000, roughly ten percent of Fortaleza’s population, (IBGE, 2010) is demographically and economically diverse. Some residents live in areas akin to the traditional

Brazilian “favela,” without basic infrastructure such as sanitation, and mostly auto-constructed shanty-style homes. However, others live in modest concrete block homes, have access to an automobile, and experience a humble, but less vulnerable livelihood overall. The term ‘favela’ is

50 While I do not provide a detailed account of Fortaleza 2040 here, I will say it presents significant improvements to prior planning models. Most noteworthy is implicit in its name, 2040, an attempt to legally require the implementation of plans designed under the project through the year 2040. This effort allows urban planning to transcend party politics by legally instituting development plans beyond the limitations of the mayor’s term of four years. 51 Canindezinho, Granja Lisboa, Granja Portugal, Bom Jardim, Siqueira.

145

often used throughout Fortaleza to describe GBJ in its entirety, many residents take offense to the homogenizing and discriminatory connotations of the term, but still use it within GBJ to refer to its most impoverished zones, and to mark social status.

Fortaleza’s rapid population growth, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s largely contributed to the emergence of GBJ and its eventual incorporation into the city limits of

Fortaleza. Original inhabitants came from the drought ridden rural interior of Ceará in search of better livelihoods and settled on the outskirts of the city, what is today GBJ, among other periphery neighborhoods. The periferia or periphery of the city was developed without formal planning, lacking numerous basic services, such as sewage systems, access to healthcare, quality education, among others. As is the case in other urban areas of Brazil, GBJ was built without the

“benefit of planners,” and often, “brick by brick,” involving numerous “insurgent movements to secure housing and property” (Caldeira & Holston, 2015:2002). GBJ is a stark contrast to the coastal side of Fortaleza, known for its upscale hotels, beaches, and nightlife; an area that hosted many World Cup soccer fans and tourists in 2014. However, many of GBJ’s residents spend their waking hours on the coast in service sector jobs as restaurant servers, hotel staff, maids, transport drivers, and security guards. Employment within GBJ is limited to small shops, eateries, construction, small (mainly female) sewing groups, and government employment usually secured through political relationships (i.e., school janitors, health post staff, social service staff, administrative positions).

Rural to urban migration additionally resulted in the importation of rural political practices such as clientelism based on the principles of coronelismo; a system in which large rural land holders (i.e., the coronel) would provide work and services to those living on his land in exchange for votes that could be used to bargain with politicians (see Paper 2). Exchanging

146

favors for votes, often referred to in GBJ as troca de favores, has largely been the lynchpin of political participation in Fortaleza and has adapted and transformed in the urban sphere. With the absence of the coronel, the landowning oligarch of the interior, urban clientelism involves a heightened level of competition for territorial control. The coronel primarily usurped power from landownership, requiring others to adhere to his authority as proprietor. In GBJ, landownership is tenuous, most houses are on squatter lots, rarely occupant-owned. Thus, local power is usurped, not from private property, but rather from the ability to control community access. To access a local community, to gain local trust, a politician must demonstrate a service (mostrar serviço) to the people, but must know beforehand, the needs of the community. Lideranças políticas or political leaders, collect intimate knowledge about communal needs and resource deficiencies.

Knowing which resources a politician should exchange, and when, for political support is key to remaining a valuable broker between local communities and the public sector. The political leader as broker, exercises power derived from a third party, in this case a politician.52 As I have shown elsewhere (Paper, 2), some brokers have sought independent power, achieved through criminal gang support. Thus, within the urban sphere, brokers are proprietors of knowledge, that when exchanged, enables the derivation of power from those holding independent power

(politicians). This has resulted in brokered networks of knowledge/information between local communities and, often, vereadores, in which resources are channeled creating loyalty chains. A leader who consistently demonstrates his/her ability to obtain resources from politicians is often supported by his/her community. However, those who benefit the most from a leader’s brokerage are usually located within his or her intimate social sphere. Thus, the social ties at the communal

52 Stuart (1972:38) distinguishes between “derived” and “independent” power used to manage subordinate units within patron-client systems. If the superior has control in his/her own hands, it is an exercise of independent power, however, the need to usurp power from a third party is derivative.

147

level mirror the contractual nature of the dyadic exchanges with politicians. Many residents identify this as a problem, stating that participation in politics must confront and alter the social order that has rendered them excluded in the first place, rather than create localized versions of the same process. Furthermore, when participatory planning initiatives are inserted into these dynamics, their potential “empowering effects” are often experienced by occupants of local positions of power, such as the leader or vereador, who already possess the capacity to solidify what scholars have called, the “non-project nature of people’s lives” and to manage “complex livelihood inter-linkages” (Cleaver, 1999:599). The NUAPs alter the process of brokerage between the informal sphere of everyday political life in GBJ and the state, creating new paths to assembling resources.

Contesting Clientelism in the “Good Garden”

Núcleos de Aproximação - NUAPS

The NUAPs emerged in 2013 as an alternative grassroots political movement that responds to the existing power hierarchy of clientelism by working to access the spaces of government as citizens with rights rather than clients with obligations. Their goal is to become actors (subjects), 53 who actively pursue their constitutional rights rather than recipients (objects) of state resources and programs. Government officials are traditionally accessed in GBJ through personal connections with a legitimate broker. Many vereadores have an association

(associação) or social project (projeto social) in local communities which provides essential services, such as a food basket (cesta básica), or medicine for an ill family member. These simple exchanges capture votes, but do little to address general social issues of, say, food insecurity or public health. The NUAPs view provisions based on relationships as a violation of

53 For the purposes of this paper, subject and subjectification are not used in the Foucauldian sense of the ‘docile subject,’ but rather in the sense of “making oneself appear, to create oneself,” (May, 2008:70).

148

their rights, and thus, seek new ways of brokering and negotiating with the state. The NUAP was not unprecedented, the idea builds on past formal groups. For example, Luizianne Lins administration created a system of local delegates (delegados) who served as local organizers for the OP model at the time. While this approach produced some favorable results for GBJ, many residents did not view their participation as rights-based. In addition, the hierarchical nature of the “delegates” approach reinforced local positions of power, namely those of the political leaders. Fabrício, a 26-year-old native of GBJ says politics is like a “two-way street, a lot of leaders sell out (se vendem) to politicians.” In general, he says that leaders sell out by giving loyalty to a municipal vereador to access scarce resources for their communities. This system of exchange, he says, obscures the role of government in GBJ and erodes democratic politics.

Former secretary, Júlio Ramon Soares Oliveira, of the Regional Executive Secretariat V, the local arm of the municipal government responsible for GBJ, described the work of the vereador in a similar manner:

The vereador is supposed to be a legislator of the municipality and should oversee

the executive branch, but it’s distorted, they end up representing a region of the

city and carry out the work of the executive branch to maintain votes. (Ramon

Soares Oliveira, Personal Communication, 2015)

This leaves community leadership structures divided between those who sell out (the liderança política) and those who refuse direct engagement with politicians (liderança social). While the former provides an important role in linking informal and formal political actors to assemble resources, the latter preserves notions of “good citizenship,” based on ideas of citizenship and rights from Brazil’s re-democratization period (see Savell, 2015). The fact that these ideals are experienced unequally among Fortaleza’s urban poor leads many periphery residents to reject the

149

political status quo by avoiding public sector engagement. As I have argued elsewhere (Paper,

1), this divide in community leadership roles can be linked to Ceará state sponsored participatory programs that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s in Fortaleza under military rule.

Thus, the line between political leaders and social leaders is often blurred, some dabble in both worlds, but others such as Aline, a 45-year-old resident of GBJ and mother of three children, are diehard defenders of local rights and claim to never sell out. While walking through

GBJ with Aline one afternoon in early 2015, RAIO (Ronda de Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas), a special operations unit of Ceará’s military police, sprayed dirt with their black motor bikes as they circled two young guys a couple yards ahead of us. As the dust cleared, one of the officers was lying next to his bike, machine gun resting across his legs. He had apparently fallen as his bike slid out from under him. The boys found this humorous, but soon changed their mind when the other officers put their guns to the boys’ heads. Aline rolled her eyes in disgust and noted that

RAIO and other military police units are one of the few instances of a physical state (government of Ceará) presence in the neighborhood. A lack of access to public officials, both municipal and within the state offices, directly supports clientelism, she said. If clientelism works, meaning resources are acquired, albeit, through personal relationships, why reject it outright, I asked?

Aline quickly responded:

Look, the leader, practically takes responsibility for everyone. For example, if a

family is needing benefits from INSS [National Institute of Social Security], the

leader goes there gets it and delivers it. I think this is wrong, they bring benefits,

but you have to be submissive, obedient to them [submisso]. This is ridiculous, I

do not agree, because everyone is free. (Aline, Personal Communication, 2015)

150

Aline demonstrates that the issue is not simply access to resources, but rather centers around the process by which they are assembled or acquired. The NUAPs embody Aline’s point, that resources should be rights-based, and not based on personal relationships. Most of the NUAP founders are community leaders with experience in community organizing and know their communities and residents intimately. Additionally, NUAP leaders are majority female, a point I address in Paper 1. Organized at the community level, NUAPs incentivize horizontal ties within

GBJ and non-clientelist vertical ties with the state. Inter-community ties, apart from familial, are rare, most political networks link communities vertically to public officials. Today there are seven NUAPs each with approximately five members each. The NUAPs partnered with

PROVOZ 54, an NGO active in GBJ since 2013, which has provided logistical support (i.e., transportation, meeting spaces), academic support (i.e., drafting reports, field-methods), and access to a broader network throughout the city. In addition, PROVOZ has aided in arranging several meetings between the NUAPs and the current mayor of Fortaleza who has been in power since 2013. This shows the increased importance of the role of NGO’s in mediating state-civil society relationships. The following is a recounting of a NUAP led negotiation with government officials that demonstrates the emergence of an alternative from of politics.

In late 2014, I accompanied a NUAP from one of the more destitute communities of GBJ known as Marrocos, named after the set location of the soap opera “O Clone”, a land occupation with few paved streets, minimal sanitary infrastructure and high indices of gang related violence.

Marrocos is located within a declared Zona Especial de Interesse Social (Zone of Special Social

54 PROVOZ is the Portuguese acronym for Programa Voz de Todos or The Voice for All Project. Created in 2013, PROVOZ has since gained institutional support from the University of Arizona, the University of Georgia, the Federal University of Ceará, the University of Fortaleza, and the City of Fortaleza. These institutions have provided basic funding, and institutional support. See: www.projetoprovoz.com

151

Interest or ZEIS).55 On this occasion, the NUAP was heading to the Secretaria Municipal de

Desenvolvimento Habitacional de Fortaleza (Municipal Secretariat of Housing or Habitafor), located on what many in GBJ refer to as the noble side (área nobre) of the city, to make claims to their right to a dignified living space (moradia digna). The noble side is known for its Miami- style coastline and levels of human development that parallel most European nations. José, a

NUAP member, had just returned in the early morning from his night job as a security guard at one of the coastal hotels. He nodded off as the kombi (VW Van/Bus) jolted over bumps and swerved through traffic. For residents like Jose, making an extra trip to the noble side of the city, usually means missing a day of work and waiting hours to see a city official, often to no avail. In addition, many residents expressed anxieties when speaking about occupying spaces of government, claiming they lack the proper attire, or do not know the proper way of speaking about or discussing political issues. One NUAP member said she was afraid they would hand her a document, stating, “since I can’t read well I will look stupid (parecer burro).” While in the

Kombi, several of the NUAP members expressed similar concerns, wondering, “what should we say, what if they do not take us seriously?” A senhora in the back said, “we know the problems, we live them every day, this is a collective voice (voz coletiva), it’s harder to ignore.” This conversation reveals the importance of ‘the part who have no part’ in coming to terms with their own legitimacy as subjects with rights (Rancière, 1999). That is, individuals who are legally citizens of a political community, but are in practice excluded from membership. Here, the role of NGOs is important, PROVOZ aides in unifying individuals precluded from membership in the

55 The ZEIS were created in the 1980s as a fundamental part of urban policy intending to give low income populations a right to the city, and a right to urban land, with proper infrastructure. The ZEIS are regulated by the Master Plan of the city (Plano Diretor), or other municipal law, and by the Federal Law N. 11.977/09 (Art. 47, inciso V) the same law that created Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life -PMCMV) urban housing program. They are typically areas occupied by precarious settlements (assentamentos precários) or underused areas that can be developed for social interest housing (Habitação de Interesse Social- HIS).

152

formal political community (i.e., excluded periphery residents) with those who are not (i.e., academics, city officials, affluent city residents), an integral part of creating a single subject with a single voice crossing class boundaries. Upon arriving in the Habitafor lobby, the NUAP joined several city officials who are partners of PROVOZ and who had helped arrange the days meeting. There was an air of apprehension as the NUAP members walked passed the crowd of people waiting to be seen by government officials. The Habitafor waiting room is often filled with periphery residents hoping to apply for or to finalize the process of acquiring housing assistance. Thus, an appointment with an official can be quite significant. In fact, one of the

NUAP members later stated, “we were received well (bem recebido) at Habitafor, which is our dream, but will our process lead to the others (in the waiting area) being seen like this too?” A clear concern that the time-old process of gaining access through relationships rather than rights would remain unaltered. The NUAPs also depend on relationships (i.e., NGOs, city officials as partners), but the nature of these bonds are inherently different. They are not representative of debt relationships.

Upon entering the office, the NUAP members were greeted by an official responsible for land regularization and ZEIS areas within the city. The official seemed overwhelmed with the presence of several community members, government partners, and a researcher. A discussion ensued about the dire situation of infrastructure and lack of access to legal land titles which would provide improved access to public resources through the ability of residents to pay property taxes. As the NUAPs spoke, the official awkwardly held his IPAD (tablet computer).

Suddenly the NUAP member stopped and said, “why aren’t you taking notes, doesn’t that thing

(the IPAD) take notes? This is important, it’s our life!” The official, embarrassed, clumsily swiped the screen and opened a notepad program and began taking digital notes. The presence of

153

the PROVOZ partners, also government officials, made it harder for Habitafor to dismiss the

NUAP member’s claims, as was often the trend in the past. In addition, the partners cited federal, state, and municipal laws that require action on behalf of the government to correct what the partners cited as gross human rights violations occurring in Marrocos. Violations that were clearly detailed by the NUAP, i.e., access to decent housing (moradia digna), property titles, security, bathrooms, and access to potable water. The partners played a crucial role in legitimizing these claims. Through this fusion of the formal and informal spheres of interaction, a single subject takes shape. Rather than poor periphery residents pleading for support from the paternal figure of the government official, a single voice emerged, a civil-state unison, which stated clearly the issues at hand, and the relevant legal violations. I had previously observed encounters between officials at the Regional V office and community leaders focused entirely on the exchange of public resources for community vote quotas. These negotiations, generally referred to as fechando um pacote (see Paper 2), roughly “closing a deal,” characterize most informal-formal interactions surrounding public resource access. However, by making rights- based demands in the Habitafor office, the NUAP created a site of what Rancière (1999) calls a

“rupture” or “dissensus,” a point at which the existing social order is exposed and may be improved or altered. Additionally, these interactions allow individuals to think of themselves as

“subjects of creation” rather than “objects of distribution” (May, 2010:5). This arises from political participation.

Finally, through their partnership with PROVOZ the NUAPs have acquired training in ethnographic field methods which has allowed them to document the lived realities of GBJ and subsequently to create diagnostic reports based on the data. These reports are an example of what

Appadurai (2013) has called “governmentality from below,” involving non-state actors enacting

154

forms of self-governance (166). The diagnostic report supplies the NUAP with a unique position of influence when interacting with government officials. Policies meant to ameliorate periphery communities are directed towards populations which are “socially, legally, and spatially, marginal” in a sense, “invisible citizens” (Appadurai, 2013:167). Thus, to render themselves part of the legitimate function of governance, the NUAP members refuse to be ‘uncountable’ and instead count themselves and force their visibility before the state. It is, “governmentality turned against itself” (Appadurai, 2013:167). The NUAPs outline a form of political participation that directly challenges the assigned position of many periphery residents as objects of distribution.

Acting within “political society” (Chatterjee, 2004) they have brought forth their own subjectivity and demonstrate how they wish to be governed. Like the NUAPs, service fairs in

GBJ enact a grassroots politics which defines them as political actors (in Rancière’s sense) through routine social interaction, but avoid directly engaging the state. As a result, they forge a new social order, albeit locally constrained, and recuse themselves from the hierarchies of patronage.

Feiras de Serviços - “Acabam Lesando o Bairro”

Informal feiras de serviços or service fairs are organized at the street level, and multiply the solidarity within the social unit of the family by joining neighbors in informal participatory groups in which scarce resources are bartered and shared equally among members. Government sponsored service fairs are also common in GBJ. These involve mobile or temporary registration stations for public social services and official identification cards (Registro Geral or RG), and other government programs. It is a burden for many of GBJ’s residents to spend a day at overcrowded and often distant government offices to sign up for these services, thus, government service fairs are a way to bring public offices to local communities. However, many residents

155

interviewed in this study believe the government locates service fairs in communities where leaders have made deals with politicians. This lack of trust has led some residents to create informal service fairs, to maintain their autonomy from the government.

Informal service fairs provide a place for residents to exchange skillsets (i.e., hair-cuts, carpentry, childcare, cooking, healthcare, etc.). They do not engage the state directly, but through their ability to decrease their dependence on traditional patrons they effectively challenge the political status quo. I view the service fairs as an embodiment of Todd May’s (2010) description of building democracy: (1) it must emerge from below rather than being granted from above, (2) is egalitarian, in a horizontal sense, participants are equal, (3) it is egalitarian in a vertical sense, the top of the police order (i.e., politicians) are also treated as equals, and (4) should be oriented towards non-violent action, not passive resistance, but creative action (22).

The service fair provides a space for the average citizen, those who may not have a history of leadership and community organizing, to incorporate the discourses of democracy into their communities. Vera, a middle-aged mother of three, works as a costureira (seamstress) using a simple sewing machine in her home. Hanging out one Saturday after a service fair, she was ranting about the vereadores causing damage to the bairro (lesando o bairro) by inserting themselves into resident’s personal lives. Her voice echoed against the whir of the sewing machine, “our representatives, like the vereador, they help people in a very personal sphere

(campo pessoal), yeah maybe you got a house, but where is our basic sanitation?” “And you know the best part,” she continued, “you are held hostage (refém) by the politician.” Vera and other residents in her community created an informal service fair to show commitment to the social sphere (campo social), to help people meet their needs and reduce the number of people dependent on clientelist resources.

156

I locate service fairs, and their politically insurgent underpinnings, within the conceptual realm of grassroots organizations or GROs. GROs can be formal or informal membership organizations in which decisions, risks, and benefits occur at the grassroots level. Members usually share risks, costs, and benefits, (Mitlin, 2004:124), and in GBJ they operate independent of the state. While these forms of resource exchange are not new, re-appropriating and re- submitting a government strategies to engage civil society back to the grassroots is an emerging trend. The NUAPs do this as well by creating their own categories and methods of participation in processes of government. In GBJ, residents, like Vera, do not refer to their work as grassroots organizing, but do note the political nature of organizing non-clientelist social interactions in which mutual help/support is shared among participants. She noted several occasions when local vereadores offered to donate resources to the service fair, but she always refused, showing resistance to the politics of patronage. I participated in several informal service fairs during my fieldwork, managed along the boundaries of kinship and in most cases territory (i.e., streets, blocks, proximity to other members). Service fairs are a site of insurgent citizenship (Holston,

2008), an emergent locus of participation that resists the existing social order. Service fairs generally fill in the gaps where state resources were lacking. They actively produce a social setting in which members have equal access to the provided resources. Participants exchange food for haircuts, childcare for carpentry, or health advice for transportation, among others.

While a breadth of better equipped and better funded NGOs and neighborhood associations providing similar services exist in GBJ many residents opt for street level forms. Fião, a regular at one of the service fairs explained the functioning of most local projects and NGOs:

Yeah, there’s a lot of projects, all for the betterment of the neighborhood [rolls his

eyes], but a majority don’t work. There is a lot of money going into these

157

associations and NGOs, but it’s restricted to particular families. So, project X is

organized by an entire family, project Y is also. If a person from outside, not part

of the family, wants in, they must have an intimate relationship with them.

Politics in GBJ is based on personal interests [politicagem], you only get in

through indication, otherwise you are ignored, you don’t exist. The community is

left without a voice. (Fião, Personal Communication, 2015)

Service fairs then, play an important role in providing a space for the promotion of rights and voice among residents. Additionally, they address the social sphere (campo social) rather than the intimate or personal sphere (campo íntimo) as is the trend in clientelism. The goal is the betterment of the community overall.

I was initially surprised by the apprehensions most residents expressed in relation to participating in the local neighborhood association or any of the numerous social projects in

GBJ. Neighborhood associations, have historically been points of important bargaining power between Brazil’s urban poor and the state (Gay, 1994). Erivelton, a social leader, explained that it is not about the ability to negotiate with the state, but rather the way in which rights become items to be exchanged for votes (moeda de troca), i.e., the way resources are assembled. For example, he says people have gone several years without a consistent supply of medicine at the clinics (postos de saúde), there is no guaranteed right to healthcare:

They [vereadores or other city officials] know there is no medicine, so they open

an association with a puppet in charge [laranja], it belongs to the official, but it

looks like the puppet opened it. So, I’m lacking medicine, I go to the association

of whomever, you get your medicine, your electric bill paid, get your water paid,

etc. The politician takes what is a right, medicines are supposed to be in the clinic,

158

notebooks are supposed to be in schools, not at the association. And that’s not the

end of it, they have a copy of your voter registration, your identification, and

during the election, “remember you were without electric and water and the

politician [o doutor] gave it to you,” you see? (Erivelton, Personal

Communication, 2015)

Erivelton’s concern is that rights are converted to exchangeable goods that tend to be managed through neighborhood associations and other politician-backed associations. The traditional neighborhood associations (associação de moradores) are losing influence as they are either coopted or replaced by new vereador supported associations that usually operate as NGOs.

Thus, the association’s role is constantly in flux, sometimes it’s the pharmacy, the library, or a place to get a cesta básica (food basket), inhibiting its ability to provide an institutional base to defend communal rights.

Thus, the social function of the service fairs is to counter the contradictions of patron- based resource assemblages. Additionally, they create a space to preserve moral conceptions of

“good citizenship” (Savell, 2015). Members of service fairs want to construct their own futures just as they always have, but self-interested politics (politicagem) hinders their ability to forge a collective future, or ‘to collectively aspire,’ to borrow Appadurai’s phrase. At one service fair, I was sitting next to Marcos while he waited for a haircut. He explained that he spent years subordinate (subordinado) to a local vereador, “the moment the campaign comes around, he’s expecting your vote, and you are obligated not just to give it, but to go after other votes for that person, because he will come find you.” Marcos admitted that while the service fair does not provide for all his needs, it does provide a sense of solidarity, and it provides a buffer so that patrons cannot as readily “take advantage of the weakness of the voter (eleitor).” The

159

participants of service fairs, thus, disengage the formal realm of politics to create isolated blocks of communal support. Through their informal organizing they create a subtle yet important resistance to clientelism. The durability and transformative potential of informal service fairs is yet to be seen. It immediately evident that the service fairs possess more transformative potential in their ability to provide a space for collective discussion and debate, the resources are not enough to meet all needs, but provide a base for solidarity.

Improving the Social Order

My goal has been to reframe informal interactions within communal groups such as the

NUAPs and service fairs, as inherently political forms, and to locate these participants as legitimate participants in politics, as subjects of politics rather than its object. This creates a more nuanced view of participation as a vehicle that “moves us from passive to active equality” (May,

2008:26). Clientelism, as a distributive resource mechanism promotes the idea of passive equality, which, as May (2008) argues, creates the image of rights and liberties as static, items to be distributed, thus action is not required to produce them. In GBJ, obtaining rights to resources such as, healthcare or education often requires relationships with those in positions of power. In other words, one’s ability to experience the ideals of democracy (equality, justice, rights) remains dependent on cultivating the proper relationships. Active equality, in contrast, arises from political action, demonstrated by the NUAPs and service fair participants when they question the proper forms of participation needed to sustain democracy and assume such ideals to be inherent provisions of democratic life. In other words, the proper distribution of resources, rights, liberties is questioned. These groups think in terms of participation rather than expectation, this is the essence of active equality (May, 2008:12).

160

The NUAPS and service fairs enact a participation that locates equality at the beginning rather than the end of political process. The work of the NUAPs and service fairs is then clear, it is a process of conversion from objects of historically entrenched distributive networks to subjects who create their world. These informal modes increase the cultural capacity (Appadurai,

2013) of the poor by building on locally based interactions which allow residents to aspire for a collective future. Clientelism perpetuates a cycle in which individuals aspire for more proximate goods and outcomes, and leaves little potential for future oriented planning or aspirations. Thus, informal participatory modes are valuable conduits for strengthening the cultural capacity of voice, based on grassroots forms of expression.

Conclusion

Politics and the forms of participation which constitute its expression, will, undoubtedly, remain a contested field of interactions, employed with diverse means and ends. In this paper, I explored how two informal participatory mechanisms, the NUAPs, and service fairs, influence politics, democracy and participation. By documenting the social interactions within these two examples, I uncovered the political quality of grassroots participation and its ability to provoke alternate understandings of ‘the political’ among the urban poor. In a context of urban poverty, where inequality is the norm, some local leaders have learned to negotiate and assemble resources in a way that maximizes benefits for their local communities via clientelist channels.

However, assembling resources based on clientelism, undoubtedly ensures the permanence of clientelism as the political status quo. Thus, informal outlets such as the NUAPs, demonstrate that some leaders have placed increased pressure on elected officials through rights-based demands. This move exposes the contradictions inherent in government discourses of democracy and equality that are often not put into practice in periphery communities.

161

I employed the concept of the “politics of equals” to analyze the meanings assigned to different ways of enacting politics to create a more concrete definition of participation. I have differentiated between informal groups, such as the NUAPs, who access formal institutions through a civil-state hybrid, and the service fairs which resist clientelism by avoiding formal institutions outright. In the case of the NUAPs, they have succeeded in negotiating with city officials without relying on clientelist channels. As a result, they have begun to assemble new resource flows to certain parts of GBJ that do not require a compensation by vote. The service fairs have achieved a subtler result; they have created interactions which lessen the oppressive tendencies of clientelism while preserving moral conceptions of the “good citizen”. They do not intend to eliminate this social order entirely, but rather to forge their own reality within it. In other words, they improve upon an unequal social order by slowly opening it to increasingly radical egalitarian demands (Bassett, 2014). The political nature of these grassroots political actions creates new spaces for emerging voices. As the NUAPs and the service fairs reveal, the presupposition of equality as the basis of participation which leads to democratic politics is possible despite endemic resource scarcity and rampant inequality.

This study has questioned and proposed a redefinition of the concept of participation as inherent to the production of politics. Politics is produced through social interaction that challenges or improves upon a given social order. My hope is that rather than assume political life and participation are lacking in Brazil’s urban peripheries, one might design participatory governance projects with existing grassroots political forms in mind. In this way, the work of residents to preserve their own conceptions of democracy and equality may be built upon and incorporated into a larger societal project. Furthermore, anthropological research should continue

162

to identify the diverse informal interactions of the urban poor that ultimately shape Brazil’s institutions and democratic future.

163

References

Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. London: New York.

Avritzer, L. (2009). Participatory institutions in democratic Brazil. Baltimore; Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Baiocchi, G., & Connor, B. T. (2013). Politics as interruption: Rancière’s community of equals and governmentality. Thesis Eleven, 117(1), 89-100.

Baiocchi, G., Heller, P., & Silva, M. K. (2011). Bootstrapping democracy: Transforming local governance and civil society in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bassett, K. (2014). Rancière, politics, and the occupy movement. Environment and Planning d- Society & Space, 32(5), 886-901. doi:10.1068/d5013

Bourdieu, P., (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. New York; Cambridge, U.K;: Cambridge University Press.

Caldeira, T. P. R., & Holston, J. (1999). Democracy, law, and violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian citizenship. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41(4), 691-729.

-- (2015). Participatory urban planning in brazil. Urban Studies, 52(11), 2001-2017. doi:10.1177/0042098014524461

Chatterjee, P., (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cleaver, F. (1999). Paradoxes of participation: Questioning participatory approaches to development. Journal of International Development, 11(4), 597-612. de Sousa Santos, B. (1998). Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a redistributive democracy. Politics & Society, 26(4), 461-510. doi:10.1177/0032329298026004003

Diamond, L. J. (1995). Democracy in Latin America: Degrees, illusions and directions for consolidation. In Beyond sovereignty: Collectively defending democracy in the Americas, Tom J. Farer. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Gay, R., 1958. (1994). Popular organization and democracy in Rio de Janeiro: A tale of two favelas. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

164

Hagopian, F. (1990). “Democracy by undemocratic means”?: Elites, political pacts, and regime transition in Brazil. Comparative Political Studies, 23(2), 147-170. doi:10.1177/0010414090023002001

Hickey, S., & Mohan, G. (2004). Participation: From tyranny to transformation?: Exploring new approaches to participation in development. New York; London: Zed books.

Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

IBGE. (2010-2014). “Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística.” (http://www.ibge.gov.br).

Lewis, D., & Mosse, D. (2006). Development brokers and translators: The ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.

May, T., (2010). Contemporary political movements and the thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in action. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

-- (2008). The political thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mitlin, D. (2004). Chapter 7: Civil Society Organizations: Do they make a difference to urban poverty? In Devas, N. (2004). Urban governance, voice, and poverty in the developing world. Sterling, VA; London: Earthscan Publications.

O'Donnell, Guillermo. (1993). On the state, democratization, and some conceptual problems: A Latin American view with glances at some post- communist countries. The Kellogg Institute Working Paper Series, no. 192 (April): pp. 1-26.

Piper, L. (2014). How participatory institutions deepen democracy through broadening representation: The case of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Theoria, 50. doi:10.3167/th.2014.6113903

Rancière, J. (1999). Dis-agreement: Politics and philosophy. London; Minneapolis;: University of Minnesota Press.

Savell, S. (2015). “I'm not a leader”: Cynicism and good citizenship in a Brazilian favela. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 38(2), 300-317. doi:10.1111/plar.12112

Stuart, W. T. (1972). The Explanation of Patron-Client Systems: Some structural and Ecological Perspectives. In A. Strickon & S. M. Greenfield (Eds.), Structure and Process in Latin America: Patronage, Clientage and Power Systems (1st ed., pp. 19-42). Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

165

Vélez-lbáñez, C. (1988). Networks Of Exchange Among Mexicans In The U.S. And Mexico: Local Level Mediating Responses To National And International Transformations. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 17(1), 27-51.

Wampler, B. (2014). Contentious politics and participatory democracy in Brazil. Política & Sociedade: Revista De Sociologia Política, 13(28), 199-224. doi:10.5007/2175- 7984.2014v13n28p199

166